ericsysmin's DevOps Blog

If you have a private, or a repo that requires authentication, like in the case of GitLab Enterprise. You may find it difficult to simply pull without any auth your roles or collections from a repository. To do this I struggled for a while, and then realized that we can make use of the envsubst command.

First step we will need to have a template lets call it galaxy_requirements.tpl:

As long as you pass the environment vars to envsubst then it will work, in this case I am going to export the var just for command line sake, but ideally you’d put these in your build tool, either github, gitlab, or jenkins as a sensitive environment parameter to the job so that it does not get printed out.

Now lets put that somewhere in our build repo, and then during the pipeline steps (github/gitlab/jenkins) you will run something like this to resolve the token and run the ansible-galaxy install.

Using these two commands will create a new file galaxy_requirements.yml which would have the following contents.

This prevents you from storing any type of credential within the repository violating any security policies you may have.