AnsibleByExample

Ansible 14.5.0 Community Package - What's New and How to Test

Beginner
2024-01-013By Luca Berton

Lesson 1 of 15 in Foundations

Ansible Foundations to Production — full curriculum
  1. 1. Introduction to Ansible and Automation
  2. 2. Installing and Configuring Ansible
  3. 3. Running Ad-Hoc Commands
  4. 4. Writing Your First Playbook
  5. 5. Understanding and Using Modules
  6. 6. Variables and Facts
  7. 7. Conditionals and Loops
  8. 8. Handlers and Idempotency
  9. 9. Structuring Projects with Roles
  10. 10. Inventory Management
  11. 11. Using Ansible Vault for Secrets
  12. 12. Debugging and Troubleshooting
  13. 13. Real-World Automation Examples
  14. 14. Final Project: Deploy a Web Server
  15. 15. Bonus - What's Next with Ansible?
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Introduction

Ansible 14.5.0 is now available on PyPI. This release is a dependency-bump release of the community package: the overall Ansible 14 series stays the same, but ansible-core moves from 2.21.4 to 2.21.5, and a handful of networking-related collections are updated to newer upstream versions. No collections were removed or added to the package in this release, and no new major features are introduced at the community package level - all functional changes live in the bumped collections and in ansible-core itself.

What's New

ansible-core bump

Ansible 14.5.0 contains ansible-core 2.21.5, up from 2.21.4 in Ansible 14.4.0. The fixes shipped in this ansible-core point release are covered in the combined changelog published alongside the release and are not broken out separately in the ansible-build-data notes for this version.

Changed Collections

Compared to Ansible 14.4.0, the following collections were bumped in Ansible 14.5.0:

CollectionAnsible 14.4.0Ansible 14.5.0Notes
ansible.netcommon8.6.28.7.1See combined changelog
ansible.utils6.1.06.1.1See combined changelog
arista.eos12.2.012.3.0See combined changelog
cisco.ios11.5.111.6.0See combined changelog
cisco.iosxr12.4.212.5.0See combined changelog

As with most 14.x point releases, these bumps are primarily bugfix-driven on the network automation side (Cisco IOS/IOS-XR, Arista EOS) and in the shared ansible.netcommon/ansible.utils foundation collections that those network collections depend on. Users who rely on cisco.ios, cisco.iosxr, arista.eos, or any collection depending on ansible.netcommon/ansible.utils for CLI/NETCONF connection handling should review the per-collection changelogs for the exact fixes included in each bump before upgrading production automation.

All other collections included in the Ansible 14 package remain at the same version as in 14.4.0.

Installation and Verification

# Install or upgrade to Ansible 14.5.0
pip install --upgrade ansible==14.5.0

# Verify the installed version and ansible-core version
ansible --version

# Confirm the bumped collection versions are present
ansible-galaxy collection list | grep -E 'ansible.netcommon|ansible.utils|arista.eos|cisco.ios|cisco.iosxr'

# Optional: install in an isolated environment to test before rolling out
python3 -m venv ansible14.5-test
source ansible14.5-test/bin/activate
pip install ansible==14.5.0
ansible --version

After upgrading, re-run existing network automation playbooks against a lab or staging environment first, paying particular attention to any Cisco IOS/IOS-XR or Arista EOS tasks that rely on ansible.netcommon connection plugins, before rolling the update out to production.

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