Ansible Avalanche Collection

Collection providing Ansible roles, playbooks and modules to manage Avalanche nodes, subnets and blockchains.

Why an Ansible collection for Avalanche?

Ava Labs provides avalanche-network-runner to easily run a local test network (either locally or in Kubernetes).

This collection takes a different approach and provides tools for production environments. Those can also be used to bootstrap realistic test networks.

It aims at:

• Provisioning Avalanche nodes on Fuji or Mainnet with flawless upgrade capabilities. Ansible also brings easy node configuration persistence and idempotent deployments.
• Bootstrapping local test networks that really mimic production environments
• Automating subnet and blockchain operations (subnet whitelisting, plugin deployment) for validators
• And more

Requirements

• Ansible >= 2.9 (see Installing Ansible)

Supported versions

This collection has been tested to work with the following versions:

• Ubuntu 20.04
• AvalancheGo >= 1.7.0

Installation

# With Ansible >= 2.10
ansible-galaxy collection install git+https://github.com/AshAvalanche/ansible-avalanche-collection.git

# With Ansible 2.9
mkdir -p ansible_collections/ash
git clone https://github.com/AshAvalanche/ansible-avalanche-collection.git ansible_collections/ash/avalanche

Getting started

The repository ansible-avalanche-getting-started provides examples of how to use the collection.

Collection resources

Modules

• ash.avalanche.tx: submit a transaction to an Avalanche network

Roles

• ash.avalanche.node: install, configure and upgrade Avalanche nodes
• ash.avalanche.subnet: create Avalanche subnets
• ash.avalanche.blockchain: create Avalanche blockchains

Playbooks

• ash.avalanche.bootstrap_local_network: bootstrap a local test network (--network-id=local)
• ash.avalanche.provision_nodes: provision nodes for Fuji or Mainnet (--network-id=fuji|mainnet)

Inventory requirements

• ash.avalanche.node:
  • All the nodes on which to install AvalancheGo have to be in the avalanche_nodes group.
  • For local networks, one of the nodes has to be in the bootstrap_node group. This node has to be started first to serve as a bootstrap node for the others. For an example of how to do that, see the bootstrap_local_network.yml playbook.
• ash.avalanche.subnet:
  • The node used to make API calls have to be in the subnet_control_node group.
  • The nodes to be added as validators to the subnet have to be in the subnet_validators group. The Ansible host has to be able to connect to those nodes via SSH.
• ash.avalanche.blockchain:
  • The node used to make API calls have to be in the subnet_control_node group.
  • The validators of the subnet have to be in the subnet_validators group. The Ansible host has to be able to connect to those nodes via SSH.

Roadmap

• Avalanche transaction module
• Subnet role
• VMs management
• Blockchain role
• TLS support