Ansible

In a previous post we saw how to automate installation of different versions of ParaView and give each one its own icon and menu entry.

What if we want to add a new version without re-downloading all the previous ones ?

We need to:

1. Find which versions we already have
2. Store this information
3. Skip steps for the ones we have

Although, these sound obvious it took quite some time to find the proper way to do it in ansible, hence this note.

As a ParaView developer it is useful to keep multiple versions of ParaView installed so that testing for regressions becomes quick and easy. I used to just drop the binaries from https://www.paraview.org/download/ right into an ~/opt directory, and add custom launchers with menulibre. To differentiate between versions I would edit the icon with Gimp so that it includes the corresponding ParaView version.

Since I started using ansible to set up different VMs and machines it became natural to look for an opportunity to use it everywhere. In this case the goal is: