In a previous article, I showed how to manually setup Alternatives so that different versions of a binary could co-exist on a target machine.
In that step-by-step example, we used the Terraform binary as an example, and placed two independent versions in /usr/local/bin, and then set the priority so that terraform14 was preferred.
To do the same thing using Ansible we first need to install the Ansible Galaxy ‘community.general’ collection.
ansible-galaxy collection install community.general
Which allows use Ansible tasks like below.
- name: terraform12 option
community.general.alternatives:
name: terraform
path: /usr/local/bin/terraform12
link: /usr/local/bin/terraform
priority: "10"
- name: terraform14 option with higher priority
community.general.alternatives:
name: terraform
path: /usr/local/bin/terraform14
link: /usr/local/bin/terraform
priority: "20"
- name: set to auto so highest priority wins
command:
cmd: update-alternatives --auto terraform
REFERENCES
Ansible community.general.alternatives
Ansible galaxy, community.general collection
NOTES:
ansible-galaxy collection download path can be placed into shared group folder
ansible-galaxy collection install community.general -p my-galaxy-collections
Collections path can be set in ansible.cfg
collections_paths = my-galaxy-collections