Steps for making a change to the Ansible AWS Security Group Module

(On OSX)

1) fork & clone ansible repo

commentary: ansible has sensibly merged back ansible-modules and ansible-modules-extra rather than continue using submodules. IF you had cloned in the submodules, go ahead and `rm -rf extras` and `core` from ansible/lib/ansible/modules or your global finds will be very confusing!

2) get `ansible-playbook` to use your repo (rather than your brew or python installed official release of ansible)

ansible/ $ . hacking/env-setup
ansible/ $ make

note that now `ansible-playbook –version` should print info about your current githash/branch

3) Try to get integration tests working locally
3A) setup AWS IAM for cloud integration tests.

a) set up an IAM user (“tester”) with ec2 full control managed policy attached and keep the key around
https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home?region=us-east-1#/policies/arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonEC2FullAccess
b) get your own aws credentials out of the way `mv ~/.aws/credentials ~/.aws/credentials.hide`
c) EC2_ACCESS_KEY=xxx
EC2_SECRET_KEY=yyy
EC2_REGION=us-east-1

3B) setup credentials.yml
copy credentials.template into credentials.yml, fill in the AWS related credentials

3C) strip down amazon.yml to the tests i care about

- hosts: amazon
  gather_facts: true
  roles:
    - role: test_ec2_group

3D) run `ansible/test/integration $ make amazon`

OPTIONAL: have it fail due to boto

fatal: [localhost]: FAILED! => {"changed": false, "failed": true, "msg": "boto required for this module"}

Remediation:

1) verify boto in your global python env

pip freeze | grep boto

if not `pip install boto`

2) if the integation tests still fail – there may be a difference between the site-packages (pip packages) between SYSTEM python (/usr/bin/python) and BREW python (/usr/local/bin/python)
Ansible uses SYSTEM python whereas you mostly use BREW python

useful diagnostic line: `which -a python`
should show the local version first if your path is setup correctly.

Fix from homebrew issue

==> Caveats
If you need Python to find the installed site-packages:
mkdir -p ~/Library/Python/2.7/lib/python/site-packages
echo ‘/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages’ > ~/Library/Python/2.7/lib/python/site-packages/homebrew.pth

OPTIONAL: fix integration tests or module not working in integration tests

4) add breaking integration test
5) fix module
6) PR
7) remove “tester” IAM user
8) DONE

other useful tools:
audit what your test suite is doing in cloudtrail (must be enabled)