In this blog post I wanted to talk about how I became a maintainer for the community.beszel Ansible Collection and my learnings.
What is Beszel?
Beszel is a simple, lightweight server monitoring software which can be self-hosted on your own infrastructure. I first heard about Beszel whilst reading the /r/selfhosted subreddit about a year ago, and a couple of months ago I had time to deploy it in my Home-Ops project.
Beszel consists of two components: the hub and the agent. The hub provides a web interface for visualising the data sent from agents which run on your servers. My Beszel Hub is currently receiving data from 10 systems in my Homelab:
If you want to read more about my setup I’ve written a little about it here.
I thought to myself, I want an automated way of deploying and managing the lifecycle of the Beszel agent on my Homelab devices, so I looked to Ansible to help me with this.
Humble Beginnings - dbrennand.beszel Ansible Role
I couldn’t find anything developed on GitHub for automated Beszel Agent deployment via Ansible, so I created an Ansible Role dbrennand.beszel on GitHub and published it to Ansible Galaxy. This standalone role worked really well and I knew the role could be useful for others, and boy was I right! 😁
It wasn’t long before pull requests were coming in to implement features outside the original agent deployment scope of the role. It was clear to me that we were going into Ansible Collection territory. If you’re new to Ansible and want to learn more about collections then check out my previous blog post where I discuss them.
Birth of community.beszel
Initially I reached out to the Beszel maintainer to propose the idea of an Ansible Collection, but after some more research I found that there is a process for requesting Ansible community collections and this seemed like a great fit. The Beszel maintainer thought so too, so I requested the new collection be created via the Ansible forum.
The initial 0.1.0 release of community.beszel implemented the same Ansible Role as dbrennand.beszel but fast forward to today, we’re on version 0.3.0 and have Ansible Roles for deploying Beszel Hub on baremetal and Ansible Modules for managing Beszel systems using the Beszel Hub REST API. There is a lot more functionality we can add to community.beszel and the collection has started to receive contributions from the community which is awesome! 😃
Learnings from becoming an Ansible Collection Maintainer
Becoming a maintainer for community.beszel has taught me a lot about creating and testing Ansible Modules. I learned how to use ansible-test to create and run integration, sanity and unit tests. I documented these steps in the collection’s CONTRUBUTING.md file. Furthermore, I recently gave some feedback on the Ansible forum about my new maintainer journey, things that I found really helpful and opportunities for improvement in documentation and tooling.
Conclusion
Overall I’ve found it very satisfying seeing how my little Ansible role has turned into something bigger, and others are getting benefit from it too. I’ve enjoyed getting more involved in the Ansible community and I’ve learned a lot about maintaining and testing content in an Ansible collection. I’m sure there is much more still to learn too!
If you’ve made it this far then thanks for reading and I hope you have a great day!