Develop a private collection

Learn how to develop a private collection that provisions a KVM guest on an IBM Z and LinuxONE LPAR.

Create and cd to this directory structure (this structure is required for the Ansible sanity checking later):
```
mkdir -p ansible_collections/example
cd ansible_collections/example
```

Download the sample collection from here. Rename the folder to rhel_kvm_roles:

git clone https://github.com/ansible-collections/collection_template.git
# renaming the folder to rhel_kvm_roles:
mv collection_template rhel_kvm_roles
cd rhel_kvm_roles

Edit galaxy.yml.

Change namespace to: example
Change name to: rhel_kvm_roles
Add a few tags, so people can search for collections

Note: For proof of concept and demo purposes no further changes are made.

# See https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/dev_guide/collections_galaxy_meta.html

namespace: example
name: rhel_kvm_roles
version: 0.1.0
readme: README.md
authors:
  - YOUR NAME (github.com/YOURGITHUB)
description: null
license_file: LICENSE
tags:
# tags so people can search for collections https://galaxy.ansible.com/search
# tags are all lower-case, no spaces, no dashes.
  - libvirt
  - kvm
  - provisioning
  - provision
repository: https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.REPO_NAME
#documentation: https://github.com/ansible-collection-migration/community.REPO_NAME/tree/main/docs
homepage: https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.REPO_NAME
issues: https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.REPO_NAME/issues
build_ignore:
# https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/devel/dev_guide/developing_collections_distributing.html#ignoring-files-and-folders
  - .gitignore
  - changelogs/.plugin-cache.yaml

Create a new folder called roles. Download and unpack guest_install.zip into that directory.

mkdir roles
cd roles
curl https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/linuxonibm/pdf/guest_install.zip
unzip guest_install.zip
rm guest_install.zip

Go to the rhel_kvm_roles folder and run the sanity check:
```
cd ..
ansible-test sanity
```

Build the collection tarball:

ansible-galaxy collection build

Expected output:

Created collection for example.rhel_kvm_roles at /path/to/rhel_kvm_roles/example-rhel_kvm_roles-0.1.0.tar.gz

Upload to private automation hub

Go to Collections -> Namespaces. Click Create to create a namespace, and name it example:

Note: You can also use any existing namespace.
In the example namespace, click upload collection:
Select the collection tarball. Click upload:
After the import is complete, the collection resides in the repository Staging. By default, there is a pipeline defined that you can use to test the collections before they are published to the Published repository. To move the collection from Staging to Published, click Collections -> Approval:
In the Approval dashboard, click approve to move the collection from the staging repository to the published repository:

For future uploads you can also use the following command as described here:

ansible-galaxy collection publish path/to/my_namespace-my_collection-1.0.0.tar.gz --api-key=SECRET

To use this collection directly from the Ansible Automation Controller (AAC) continue with running a playbook.

If you want to use the collection from a command line interface (CLI), go to the published repository (Collections -> Repositories -> published), click Copy CLI configuration and place the information in /etc/ansible.cfg on the system that needs access to this collection:

Collection published confirmation screen

To learn more about the CLI, have a look at Configuring Red Hat Automation Hub as the primary source for content.