Ansible role for EasyBuild (with Lmod)

Requirements

• CentOS 6
• Ansible version 2.0.1

Variables

easybuild_root

Default: /apps

Directory in which to store all EasyBuild and Lmod files.

Local deployment with Vagrant

Easy deployment on a local virtual machine using Vagrant is provided in the vagrant directory.

Todo

Yum vs EasyBuild

For some base packages, figure out whether to install with yum or with EasyBuild (e.g., Perl).

Incorrect source downloads

How to work around EasyBuild packages where the source tarball downloads are incorrect (e.g., GCCcore/gmp-6.0.0a.tar.bz2 for which an HTML page is dowloaded)?

Possible solutions:

1. Patch the recipe.
2. Download the tarball separately.
3. Include the tarball with the playbook.

Package installation

How to proceed with actually installing EasyBuild packages, preferably driven by other roles? Options:

1. Just use tasks like the following: shell: . {{ easybuild_root }}/modules/modules.bashrc && module load EasyBuild && eb SOME_PACKAGE --robot
2. Have a custom easybuild Ansible module which wraps this.
3. Have a easybuild_packages variable with a list of packages to be installed by this role.
4. Similar, but as a separate easybuild-packages role which is cheaper to repeatedly include from other roles.

I'm inclined to start with 1 and later choose between 2 and 4.

Preferably the final solution should provide idempotency.

Custom EasyBuild configs

How best to integrate custom EasyBuild configs? As separate role per set of configs? Are these configs stored alongside the 'normal' configs?