Volant

Fast, drop-in engine for Ansible playbooks.

Volant runs your existing playbooks, roles and inventories unchanged, and runs them faster. It uploads a small static agent once per host and sends tasks in batches instead of one SSH round trip each. Collections, Python modules in a warm interpreter and a plan command that shows what would change are what the project is building towards.

Status: pre-alpha. A play compiles and runs end to end: pre_tasks, roles with their dependencies and argument specs, tasks and post_tasks; blocks with rescue and always; handlers, with listen, meta: flush_handlers and --force-handlers; tags and the four listing commands; serial batches; until retries; no_log; environment; run_once and delegate_to; and include_tasks, include_role and include_vars read while the play runs. Tasks travel over SSH with the agent cached on each host, under Ansible's variable precedence and templating, become through sudo, forks and the full host-pattern grammar. Only the native modules run, and collections, fact gathering and check mode are not there yet; a playbook that needs one of them is refused before the first connection instead of half-run. Keywords lists what this release executes and what it refuses.

Installation

Pre-built binaries will be published with every release:

cargo binstall volant

Until then, build from source with a recent stable Rust toolchain:

cargo install --git https://github.com/lorica-labs/volant volant

Promises

• Your playbooks work as they are. There is no conversion step and no new format.
• Linux targets over SSH first. Windows and network devices come later.
• Volant collects no telemetry and makes no network call other than what your playbook asks for.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. Questions go to Discussions, bugs and feature requests to Issues.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE.