Galaxy v3 API: update collection_url defaults

[felixfontein]

The current default is {"*": "https://galaxy.ansible.com/{namespace}/{name}"}, which will likely not work for arbitrary collections for the new Ansible Community Galaxy.

[felixfontein]

Pinging @rochacbruno @jctanner since they can probably help figuring out with what to replace it, resp. whether we can find a solution that works with both the old and the new galaxy.

[felixfontein]

For context, these links are used in the docsite, for example see the This module is part of the community.general collection (version 6.6.0). note on https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/devel/collections/community/general/aerospike_migrations_module.html#community-general-aerospike-migrations-module-check-or-wait-for-migrations-between-nodes. The note contains a link to https://galaxy.ansible.com/community/general.

[rochacbruno]

@felixfontein

On the new version of Galaxy, that URL will stop working and will redirect to the home page.

The URLs must now be specific, whether it is a collection or legacy role,

Collection

https://beta-galaxy.ansible.com/ui/repo/published/{namespace}/{name}/

and

Role

https://beta-galaxy.ansible.com/ui/legacy/roles/{namespace}/{name}/

We don't have a catch-all like URL as we had before, the current implementation performs a lookup to figure out if the path is related to a collection or a role, but we are not bringing this functionality to the new galaxy.

We may, in the future, map shorter URLs to ui/repo/published fragment, however this is not on our short team roadmap because we have higher priority performance issues to fix.

So to answer your question, for now there is no URL that will be equivalent on old and new galaxy

c/c @awcrosby

[gotmax23]

I consider breaking every URL unacceptable. There are many places that link to collections and roles on Galaxy. IMHO, galaxy.ansible.com shouldn't switch to the new Galaxy NG codebase until redirects or some other solution is added.

[felixfontein]

There are several options that would fix / soften several of these problems:

1. Add redirects for existing collections and roles to the new URLs (to avoid breaking a huge amount of links already existing);
2. Add redirects /ui/repo/published/{namespace}/{name}/ → /{namespace}/{name}/ and /ui/legacy/roles/{namespace}/{name}/ → /{namespace}/{name}/ to the existing Galaxy so that folks can already start the new link structure now to avoid a single large breaking change once the codebase is switched to galaxy_ng.

CC @ansible-community/community-team.

[awcrosby]

Regarding those options...

1. We can investigate adding a large number of nginx redirects in our new installation. 80% of all role downloads come from about 200 roles, so maybe we can add redirects for a number that is smaller than the total 34,000 roles.
2. That sounds like a good idea

[felixfontein]

@awcrosby is there already an update on 2 (like: already done, planned to be done with ETA, planned to be done without ETA, still under discussion, ...) and/or 1? Or something else?

[himdel]

Option 1 should be working now (ansible/ansible-hub-ui#4090) :),
it's not a straight redirect, it's a disambiguation page that tries to find any matching collections and/or roles and link to those.

TLDR: https://beta-galaxy.ansible.com/ansible/posix

[felixfontein]

That's not exactly the option 1 I described above, but it also works well :) For some existing collections it also shows a long list of legacy roles, but since collections are coming first I think that's ok. (Example: https://beta-galaxy.ansible.com/ui/dispatch/?pathname=%2Fcommunity%2Fdns)

BTW, https://beta-galaxy.ansible.com/ui/ is still advertising AnsibleFest in May 2023 :)

[rochacbruno]

BTW, beta-galaxy.ansible.com/ui is still advertising AnsibleFest in May 2023 :)

@felixfontein we are changing that image soon

[himdel]

For some existing collections it also shows a long list of legacy roles, but since collections are coming first I think that's ok.

Yeah, that was a bug :) fixed in ansible/ansible-hub-ui#4144, should come to beta-galaxy soon

[felixfontein]

I created #220 to update the collection_url default.