Announcing the Community Ansible 3.0.0 Package

Version 3.0.0 of the Ansible community package marks the end of the restructuring of the Ansible ecosystem. This work culminates what began in 2019 to restructure the Ansible project and shape how Ansible content was delivered. Starting with Ansible 3.0.0, the versioning and naming reflects the new structure of the project in the following ways:

The versioning methodology for the Ansible community package now adopts semantic versioning, and begins to diverge from the versions of the Ansible Core package (which contains the Ansible language and runtime)
The forthcoming Ansible Core package will be renamed from ansible-base in version 2.10 to ansible-core in version 2.11 for consistency

First, a little history. In Ansible 2.9 and prior, every plugin and module was in the Ansible project (https://github.com/ansible/ansible) itself. When you installed the "ansible" package, you got the language, runtime, and all content (modules and other plugins). Over time, the overwhelming popularity of Ansible created scalability concerns. Users had to wait many months for updated content. Developers had to rely on Ansible maintainers to review and merge their content. These obvious bottlenecks needed to be addressed.

During the Ansible 2.10 development cycle, the Ansible community successfully migrated most modules and plugins into Collections. Collections, and the modules and plugins within them, could now be developed, updated and released independently of Ansible itself. When the migration was done, what remained in the core project started shipping as ansible-base, and the Ansible Community Team created a new Ansible community package. The Ansible 2.10 community package included ansible-base 2.10 plus all the Collections that contain modules and plugins that were migrated out of the original repository. As of Ansible 2.10, community users had two options: continue installing everything with the Ansible community package, or install ansible-base and then add selected Collections individually.

Today, there are 3 distinct artefacts in the Ansible open source world:

Ansible Core - A minimal Ansible language and runtime (soon to be renamed from ansible-base)
Ansible Collections on Galaxy (community supported)
Ansible community package - Ansible installation including ansible-base/core plus community curated Collections

Now that these artefacts are managed separately, their versions are diverging as well. Moving forward, Ansible Core will maintain its existing numbering scheme (similar to the Linux Kernel). The next version of Ansible Core after ansible-base 2.10 will be ansible-core 2.11. The Ansible community package (Ansible Core + community Collections) is adopting semantic versioning. The next version of the Ansible community package after 2.10 is 3.0.0.

How the package is maintained and created has changed, but when you install the Ansible community package, you still get the functionality that existed in Ansible 2.9, with newer versions of modules and plugins. Ansible 3.0.0 includes more than 85 Collections containing thousands of modules and other plugins.

With so many changes happening at once for the Ansible community, we thought it was a good idea to put together a Q&A that can be found on our blog.