How to use Ansible layer in Spacemacs?

Question

How to use Ansible layer in Spacemacs?

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I am trying to understand how to write Ansible roles and test them using this layer. I added ansible to dotspacemacs-configuration-layers, restarted Spacemacs and checked Messages to see what is loaded.

Loading /home/anatoli/.emacs.d/layers/+tools/ansible/packages.el (source)...done
Loading /home/anatoli/.emacs.d/layers/+tools/ansible/layers.el (source)...
Loading /home/anatoli/.emacs.d/layers/+lang/yaml/packages.el (source)...done
Loading /home/anatoli/.emacs.d/layers/+tools/ansible/layers.el (source)...done
...
Loading /home/anatoli/.emacs.d/layers/+tools/ansible/funcs.el (source)...done
...
Loading /home/anatoli/.emacs.d/layers/+tools/ansible/config.el (source)...done

I still don't see anything. SPC m h a from documentation doesn't work - resulting in SPC m is undefined. Spacemacs shows /YAML\ at the bottom near the filename. I don't see that Spacemacs detected YAML file as an Ansible playbook - I don't get any hints or errors displayed on the screen. Perhaps I need to change mode from YAML to Ansible somehow. If so - how do I do this?

Answer 1

For the Ansible layer to take action, your buffer filename must match one of main.yml, site.yml, roles/.+\.yml, group_vars/.+, etc. See the regex at the bottom of ansible/config.el (v0.200.13) for exact patterns.

EDIT: I added some additional paths to the regex above in PR #12726, which will go into Spacemacs v0.300.x.

In Emacs, you can manually enable ansible-doc-mode for the current buffer with M-x ansible-doc-mode RET. You'd probably also want to enable the company back-end with M-: (add-to-list 'company-backends 'company-ansible) RET. Then use M-x ansible RET to toggle the Ansible minor mode, which provides syntax highlighting, completion, vault functions, etc.

Unfortunately, it's not a slam dunk to use Emacs file variables to enable this minor mode explicitly (for files that don't match the regex linked above); this is a separate conversation. See Specifying File Variables in the Emacs manual for more information. I use the following at the bottom of my files:

# Local Variables:
# eval: (ansible-doc-mode 1)
# eval: (add-to-list (quote company-backends) (quote company-ansible))
# eval: (ansible 1)
# End:

( P.S. Regarding your comment about testing Ansible roles with this Spacemacs layer, I don't think that is directly supported as a feature, but you could likely find ways to run test-kitchen or similar from Emacs. )