Ansible to TOSCA Converter

TOSCA Node Type Creation

This tool converts Ansible playbooks to TOSCA files as follows:

• A TOSCA node type is created that acts as a wrapper around the playbook.
• Playbook variables are converted to TOSCA property definitions for the newly created node type. Default values are assigned as specified in the playbook.
• A Standard interface is defined on the node type with a create operation that uses the playbook as its implementation artifact.
• Operation inputs are defined for the create operation that use $get_property functions to reference node properties

TOSCA Data Type Creation

• Property definitions in the newly created TOSCA node types use TOSCA data types that are inferred from the types of the playbook variables.
• Primarty types are converted directly to their corresponding TOSCA types (string, integer, boolean, float, list, map).
• Playbook variables that are dictionaries are converted to complex TOSCA data types. Nested structures become separate, reusable TOSCA data types.
• For lists of dictionaries, custom entry_schema types are created.

Service Template Creation

The current version of ans2tosca creates a TOSCA service template that defines:

• Inputs that correspond to the properties defined in the TOSCA node type created for the Ansible playbook. If those property definitions define a default value, the corresponding input definition is marked as optional.
• One single node template of the TOSCA node type created for the Ansible playbook. For each of the properties defined in the node type, a property assignment is created that uses a $get_input function to retrieve a corresponding input alue.

The following feature is not yet implemented.

Several Ansible playbooks may be required to configure devices or to deploy services. These playbooks will be combined into a single TOSCA service template as follows:

• For each of the playbooks, a corresponding TOSCA node type is defined.
• For each of the playbooks, a node template of the newly created TOSCA type is created.
• Execution ordering between the playbooks maps to DependsOn relationships between the node templates.

Using ans2tosca

The following shows the top-level commands exposed by the ans2tosca as well as the available command line options:

usage: ans2tosca [-h] [-n NODE_NAME] [-o OUTPUT] playbook

Convert Ansible playbook to TOSCA file

positional arguments:
  playbook              Path to the Ansible playbook file

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -n NODE_NAME, --node-name NODE_NAME
                        Optional name for the generated node type
  -o OUTPUT, --output OUTPUT
                        Optional output file path. Defaults to <stderr>

Installing ans2tosca

ans2tosca is written in Python3. We recommend that you run the in a virtual environment. To support virtual environments, make sure the python virtual environments module is installed. On Fedora, the virtual environment module appears to be included in the standard Python3 installation. On Ubuntu, the virtual environments module can be installed as follows:

sudo apt install python3-venv

You can then create and activate your virtual environment as follows:

python3 -m venv env
source env/bin/activate

The ans2tosca tool uses PEP-517 and PEP-518 based installation systems that require the latest version of pip. To upgrade pip to the latest version, run the following command in your virtual environment:

pip install -U pip 

Next, download the latest release from https://github.com/ubicity-corp/ans2tosca/releases/download/v0.0.2/ans2tosca-0.0.2-py3-none-any.whl and install it in the activated virtual environment using the downloaded wheel file:

pip install ans2tosca-0.0.2-py3-none-any.whl

You can verify that the ans2tosca software has been installed by running the following command in your virtual environment:

ans2tosca --version

This will display the version of the installed software.