ansible-collection

The IBM Blockchain Platform provides advanced tooling that allows you to quickly build, operate & govern and grow blockchain networks. It uses Hyperledger Fabric, the open source, industry standard for enterprise blockchain. It also helps you to deploy Hyperledger Fabric networks anywhere, either to cloud or on-premises, using Kubernetes.

This Ansible collection, provided as part of the IBM Blockchain Platform, enables you to automate the building of Hyperledger Fabric networks.

Please Note the main branch is now set to 2.0.0-beta, the release-1.2 branch is available. If you build a local copy of Ansible for production, please work from the release-1.2 branch.

Beta support for Fabric Operator and Fabric Operations Console

With the Open Source version of the Fabric Operations Console and the Fabric Operator, it is possible now to use the Ansible Playbooks previously targetted towards The IBM Blockchain Platform in a complete open source stack.

This should be considered beta functionality at present, please do try it out, but would not advise production use cases at present. Both the Operator AND the Console must be installed.

Currently the installation of the Operator and Console are available via Playbooks. Once installed Fabric resources can be managed with the existing Ansible modules.

Please see the README in the opensource-stack example for more information.

Noteable Updates

• there should be support now for IKS1.25 in the HLFSupport and OpenSource consoles/operators

• there is now a chaincode information module chaincode_list_info to get details of chaincodes in a peer

• the approved chaincode module can now handle automatic sequence numbers. See the example playbook for how to use these two new chaincode abilities

• Note only the fabric-console/fabric-operator-crds and hlfsupport-console/hlf-crds should be used. The IBP-centric console/crd should be considered deprecated.

Using the collection

The choice will depend on what context you want to use ansible in.

• If you've existing Ansible configurations you can install the v1.2 collection via ansible-galaxy collection install ibm.blockchain_platform. For v2 install from source (see next option).
• Install from source; clone this github repo, and run

    ansible-galaxy collection build -f
    ansible-galaxy collection install $(ls -1 | grep ibm-blockchain_platform) -f

• Using a Docker container. For v1.2, a Docker image, ibmcom/ibp-ansible, has been published to Docker Hub.

  You can run a playbook using this Docker image, by volume mounting the playbook into the Docker container and running the ansible-playbook command:

  docker run --rm -u $(id -u) -v /path/to/playbooks:/playbooks ibmcom/ibp-ansible ansible-playbook /playbooks/playbook.yml
  

  Note that the UID flag -u $(id -u) ensures that Ansible can write connection profile and identity files to the volume mount.

  For v2.0, the docker image is in the ghcr.io registry. It can be run in the same way

  docker pull ghcr.io/ibm-blockchain/ofs-ansibe:sha-826e86e
  docker run --rm -u $(id -u) -v /path/to/playbooks:/playbooks ghcr.io/ibm-blockchain/ofs-ansibe:sha-826e86e ansible-playbook /playbooks/playbook.yml
  

• If you are using github actions for CI/CD there is a github action that uses the same docker image as the basis. For example; note this action needs to still be published. In the interim please copy this to your own repository

    - name: Create the Fabric CRDs/Operator
      id: operatorinstall
      uses: ./fabric-ansible-action
      with:
        playbook: playbooks/operator_console_playbooks/01-operator-install.yml
  

Documentation

Documentation for this Ansible collection is available here: https://ibm-blockchain.github.io/ansible-collection/

The documentation includes installation instructions, tutorials, and reference material for all modules and roles in this collection.

License

Apache-2.0

Author Information

This Ansible collection is maintained by the IBM Blockchain Platform development team. For more information on the IBM Blockchain Platform, visit the following website: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/blockchain-platform