- Allow config to enable native jinja types (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/32738)
- Extends `module_defaults` by adding a prefix to defaults `group/` which denotes a builtin or user-specified list of modules, such as `group/aws` or `group/gcp`
- New keyword `ignore_unreachable` for plays and blocks. Allows ignoring tasks that fail due to unreachable hosts, and check results with `is unreachable` test.
- New yumdnf module defines the shared argument specification for both yum and dnf modules and provides an entry point to share code when applicable
- Remove support for simplejson (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/42761)
- Support for running an Ansible controller with Python-2.6 has been dropped. You can still manage machines which use Python-2.6 but you will have to manage them from a machine which has Python-2.7 or Python-3.5 or greater installed. See the `porting guide <https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/devel/porting_guides/porting_guide_2.7.html>`_ if you need more information.
- new yum action plugin enables the yum module to work with both yum3 and dnf-based yum4 by detecting the backend package manager and routing commands through the correct Ansible module for that python API
- Add `is_boto3_error_code` function to `module_utils/aws/core.py` to make it easier for modules to handle special AWS error codes.
- Add use_backend to yum module/action plugin
- Added PrivilegeUtil PowerShell module util to easily control Windows Privileges in a process
- Added capability to skip ssl verification on zabbix host with dynamic inventory
- Added inventory.any_unparsed_is_failed configuration setting. In an inventory with a static hosts file and (say) ec2.py, enabling this setting will cause a failure instead of a warning if ec2.py fails.
- Added new filter to generate random MAC addresses from a given string acting as a prefix. Refer to the appropriate entry which has been added to user_guide playbook_filters.rst document.
- Added the from_yaml_all filter to parse multi-document yaml strings. Refer to the appropriate entry which as been added to user_guide playbooks_filters.rst document.
- Ansible-2.7 changes the Ansiballz strategy for running modules remotely so that invoking a module only needs to invoke python once per module on the remote machine instead of twice.
- Better error handling for depsolve and transaction errors in DNF
- Changed the prefix of all Vultr modules from vr to vultr (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/42942).
- Enable installroot tests for yum4(dnf) integration testing, dnf backend now supports that
- Explicit encoding for the output of the template module, to be able to generate non-utf8 files from a utf-8 template. (https://github.com/ansible/proposals/issues/121)
- File locking feature added, making it possible to gain exclusive access to given file through module_utils.common.file.FileLock (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/29962)
- Fix dnf handling of autoremove to be compatible with yum
- In Ansible-2.4 and above, Ansible passes the temporary directory a module should use to the module. This is done via a module parameter (_ansible_tmpdir). An earlier version of this which was also prototyped in Ansible-2.4 development used an environment variable, ANSIBLE_REMOTE_TMP to pass this information to the module instead. When we switched to using a module parameter, the environment variable was left in by mistake. Ansible-2.7 removes that variable. Any third party modules which relied on it should use the module parameter instead.
- New config options `display_ok_hosts` and `display_failed_stderr` (along with the existing `display_skipped_hosts` option) allow more fine-grained control over the way that ansible displays output from a playbook (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41058)
- Removed an unnecessary import from the AnsiballZ wrapper
- Restore module_utils.basic.BOOLEANS variable for backwards compatibility with the module API in older ansible releases.
- Setting file attributes (via the file module amongst others) now accepts + and - modifiers to add or remove individual attributes. (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/33838)
- Switch from zip to bc for certain package install/remove test cases in yum integration tests. The dnf depsolver downgrades python when you uninstall zip which alters the test environment and we have no control over that.
- The acme_account and acme_certificate modules now support two backends: the Python cryptograpy module or the OpenSSL binary. By default, the modules detect if a new enough cryptography module is available and use it, with the OpenSSL binary being a fallback. If the detection fails for some reason, the OpenSSL binary backend can be explicitly selected by setting select_crypto_backend to openssl.
- The apt, ec2_elb_lb, elb_classic_lb, and unarchive modules have been ported away from using __file__. This is futureproofing as__file__ won't work if we switch to using python -m to invoke modules in the future or if we figure out a way to make a module never touch disk for pipelining purposes.
- The password_hash filter supports all parameters of passlib. This allows users to provide a rounds parameter. (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/15326)
- dnf - group removal does not work if group was installed with Ansible because of dnf upstream bug https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1620324
- ec2_group - Add diff mode support with and without check mode. This feature is preview and may change when a common framework is adopted for AWS modules.
- elasticsearch_plugin - Add the possibility to use the elasticsearch_plugin installation batch mode to install plugins with advanced privileges without user interaction.
- gather_subset - removed deprecated functionality for using comma separated list with gather_subset (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/44320)
- get_url - implement [expend checksum format to <algorithm>:(<checksum>|<url>)] (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/27617)
- roles - removed deprecated functionality for non YAML role specs (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/44320)
- roles - removed deprecated special casing functionality of connection, port, and remote_user for role params (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/44320)
- service - removed deprecated state=running (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/44320)
- shell module - Add support for check mode when passing creates or removes arguments. (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/40428)
- sns_topic - Port sns_topic module to boto3 and add an integration test suite.
- ssh - reset connection will show a warning instead of failing for older OpenSSH versions
- to_nice_json - specify separators to json.dumps to normalize the output between python2 and python3 (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/42633)
- user - backup shadow file on platforms where the module modifies it directly (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/40696)
- user module - add a sanity check for the user's password and a more helpful warning message (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/43615)
- win_disk_image - return a list of mount paths with the return value ``mount_paths``, this will always be a list and contain all mount points in an image
- win_psexec - Added the ``session`` option to specify a session to start the process in
- winrm - change the _reset() method to use reset() that is part of ConnectionBase
Deprecated Features
-------------------
- Modules will no longer be able to rely on the __file__ attribute pointing to a real file. If your third party module is using __file__ for something it should be changed before 2.8. See the 2.7 porting guide for more information.
- The `skippy`, `full_skip`, `actionable`, and `stderr` callback plugins have been deprecated in favor of config options that influence the behavior of the `default` callback plugin (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41058)
- The configuration toggle, ``merge_multiple_cli_tags``, has been removed. This setting controlled whether specifying ``--tags`` or ``--skip-tags`` multiple times on the commandline would merge the specified tags or use the old behaviour of overwriting the previous entry. The overwriting behaviour was deprecated in 2.3 and the default value of the config option became merge in 2.4.
-**Security Fix** - Some connection exceptions would cause no_log specified on a task to be ignored. If this happened, the task information, including any private information could have been displayed to stdout and (if enabled, not the default) logged to a log file specified in ansible.cfg's log_path. Additionally, sites which redirected stdout from ansible runs to a log file may have stored that private information onto disk that way as well. (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41414)
-**Security Fix** - avoid loading host/group vars from cwd when not specifying a playbook or playbook base dir
-**Security Fix** - avoid using ansible.cfg in a world writable dir.
- Additional checks ensure that there is always a result of hashing passwords in the password_hash filter and vars_prompt, otherwise an error is returned. Some modules (like user module) interprets None as no password at all, which can be dangerous if the password given above is passed directly into those modules.
- Avoids deprecated functionality of passlib with newer library versions.
- Changed the admin_users config option to not include "admin" by default as admin is frequently used for a non-privileged account (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41164)
- Fix alt linux detection/matching
- Fix an atomic_move error that is 'true', but misleading. Now we show all 3 files involved and clarify what happened.
- Fix ec2_group support for multi-account and peered VPC security groups. Reported in https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issue/44788 and fixed in https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/45296
- Fix ecs_taskdefinition handling of changed role_arn. If the task role in a ECS task definition changes ansible should create a new revsion of the task definition. https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/45317
- Fix health check parameter handling in elb_target_group per https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/43244 about health_check_port. Fixed in https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/45314
- Fix lambda_policy updates when principal is an account number. Backport of https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/44871
- Fix the mount module's handling of swap entries in fstab (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/42837)
- Fixed an issue where ``ansible_facts.pkg_mgr`` would incorrectly set to ``zypper`` on Debian/Ubuntu systems that happened to have the command installed.
- Fixed runtime module to be able to handle syslog_facility properly when python systemd module installed in a target system. (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41078)
- Grafana dashboard module compatible with grafana 5 (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41249)
- On Python2, loading config values from environment variables could lead to a traceback if there were nonascii characters present. Converted them to text strings so that no traceback will occur (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/43468)
- The fix for `CVE-2018-10875 <https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2018-10875>`__ prints out a warning message about skipping a config file from a world writable current working directory. However, if the user explicitly specifies that the config file should be used via the ANSIBLE_CONFIG environment variable then Ansible would honor that but still print out the warning message. This has been fixed so that Ansible honors the user's explicit wishes and does not print a warning message in that circumstance.
- The fix for `CVE-2018-10875 <https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2018-10875>`__ prints out a warning message about skipping a config file from a world writable current working directory. However, if the user is in a world writable current working directory which does not contain a config file, it should not print a warning message. This release fixes that extaneous warning.
- The ssh connection plugin was categorizing all 255 exit statuses as an ssh error but modules can return exit code 255 as well. The connection plugin has now been changed to know that certain instances of exit code 255 are not ssh-related. (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41716)
- allow custom endpoints to be used in the aws_s3 module (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/36832)
- allow gathering env exception to work even when injection is off
- always correctly template no log for tasks https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/43294
- ansible-galaxy - properly list all roles in roles_path (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/43010)
- authorized_key now have an option for following symlinks, default behaviour (False) can be changed by setting follow True/False
- basic.py - catch ValueError in case a FIPS enabled platform raises this exception - https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/44447
- become runas - changed runas process so it does not create a temporary file on the disk during execution
- cloudfront_distribution - replace call to nonexistent method 'validate_distribution_id_from_caller_reference' with 'validate_distribution_from_caller_reference' and set the distribution_id variable to the distribution's 'Id' key.
- corrected and clarified 'user' option deprecation in systemd module in favor of 'scope' option.
- delegate_to - ensure if we get a non-Task object in _get_delegated_vars, we return early (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/44934)
- docker_container: fixing ``working_dir`` idempotency problem (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/42857)
- docker_container: makes unit parsing for memory sizes more consistent, and fixes idempotency problem when ``kernel_memory`` is set (see https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/16748 and https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/42692)
- ec2_group - Sanitize the ingress and egress rules before operating on them by flattening any lists within lists describing the target CIDR(s) into a list of strings. Prior to Ansible 2.6 the ec2_group module accepted a list of strings, a list of lists, or a combination of strings and lists within a list. https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/45594
- ec2_vpc_route_table - check the origin before replacing routes. Routes with the origin 'EnableVgwRoutePropagation' may not be replaced.
- elasticsearch_plugin - Improve error messages and show stderr of elasticsearch commands
- elb_application_lb - Fix a dangerous behavior of deleting an ELB if state was omitted from the task. Now state defaults to 'present', which is typical throughout AWS modules.
- file module - The touch subcommand had its diff output broken during the 2.6.x development cycle. The patch to fix that broke check mode. This is now fixed (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/42111)
- file module - The touch subcommand had its diff output broken during the 2.6.x development cycle. This is now fixed (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/41755)
- fix async for the aws_s3 module by adding async support to the action plugin (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/40826)
- fix decrypting vault files for the aws_s3 module (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/39634)
- fix default SSL version for docker modules https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/42897
- fix for the bundled selectors module (used in the ssh and local connection plugins) when a syscall is restarted after being interrupted by a signal (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/41630)
- fix mail module for python 3.7.0 (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/44552)
- fix the enable_snat parameter that is only supposed to be used by an user with the right policies. https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/44418
- fix the remote tmp folder permissions issue when becoming a non admin user - https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/41340, https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/42117
- flatten filter - use better method of type checking allowing flattening of mutable and non-mutable sequences (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/44331)
- gce_net - Fix sorting of allowed ports (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/41567)
- include - Change order of where the new block is inserted with apply so that apply args are not applied to the include also (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/44912)
- includes - ensure we do not double register handlers from includes to prevent exception (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/44848)
- loop - Ensure that a loop with a when condition that evaluates to false and delegate_to, will short circuit if the loop references an undefined variable. This matches the behavior in the same scenario without delegate_to (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/45189)
- loop - Ensure we only cache the loop when the task had a loop and delegate_to was templated (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/44874)
- urls - Only assume GET method if data is empty, otherwise POST
- user - Strip trailing comments in /etc/default/passwd (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/43931)
- user - fix bug that resulted in module always reporting a change when specifiying the home directory on FreeBSD (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/42484)
- user - use correct attribute name in FreeBSD for creat_home (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/42711)
- vars_prompt - properly template play level variables in vars_prompt (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/37984)
- vars_prompt with encrypt does not require passlib for the algorithms supported by crypt.
- vault - fix error message encoding, and ensure we present a friendlier error when the EDITOR is missing (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/44423)
- win_chocolatey - enable TLSv1.2 support when downloading the Chocolatey installer https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/41906
- win_chocolatey - fix issue where state=downgrade would upgrade a package if no version was set
- win_domain - ensure the Netlogon service is up and running after promoting host to controller - https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/39235
- win_domain - fixes typo in one of the AD cmdlets https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/41536
- win_domain_computer - fixed deletion of computer active directory object that have dependent objects (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/44500)
- win_domain_controller - ensure the Netlogon service is up and running after promoting host to controller - https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/39235
- win_iis_webapppool - redirect some module output to null so Ansible can read the output JSON https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/40874
- win_lineinfile - changed `-Path` to `-LiteralPath` so that square brackes in the path are interpreted literally - https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/44508
- winrm - ensure pexpect is set to not echo the input on a failure and have a manual sanity check afterwards https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/41865
- winrm - running async with become on a Server 2008 or 2008 R2 host will now work
New Plugins
-----------
Callback
~~~~~~~~
- counter_enabled - adds counters to the output items (tasks and hosts/task)
- logdna - Sends playbook logs to LogDNA
- splunk - Sends task result events to Splunk HTTP Event Collector
Connection
~~~~~~~~~~
- psrp - Run tasks over Microsoft PowerShell Remoting Protocol
Inventory
~~~~~~~~~
- tower - Ansible dynamic inventory plugin for Ansible Tower.
