@fiftin I'm very interested in the feature you mention above, about Ansible version management, and we did have a conversation about it in issue #2682 too. But, a few questions on that as referenced above:

• You say it will be VENVs. Would it be possible to call containers instead of Python/pip VENVs? I feel like it would maybe be more "stable" and repeatable to build it in containers, having Dockerfiles that one can modify/share with the community.
• Would it be possible to have multiple VENVs/containers and be able to call them specifically for some tasks that require a certain version of Ansible? For example, for the vast majority of day-to-day tasks, using Ansible 2.18 works fine for me/us, but for some legacy systems (Rocky Linux 8), we need to use Ansible 2.16. I would prefer to not have to run two different Semaphore instances for this, as that gets confusing for users.

Sorry for the cross-post here, but when I did a little searching in the project I found this discussion and wanted to also draw the participants attention to the issue and discussion there. Plus, if anyone has come up with some kind of intermittent solution for this, I'm very interested in any ideas that could help with the problem I'm currently up against.

@mlanner, I agree with you that running two instances of Semaphore can be cumbersome. There might be a way to run two containers as runner nodes and dispatch tasks to them according to the inventory that is targeted - I think that this was feature introduced on version 2.13

I would prefer that this feature be implemented as VENVs, and that you could choose on the task template definition which VENV you would like them to be run on. By default new task template run on the default VENV that uses the ansible version shipped with Semaphore UI, but if you need to, you can set a different ansible version on the Task Template UI, this would create a VENV under /opt/semaphore/apps/ansible that would be used to run any task that uses that particular ansible version. This way VENVs can be reused for multiple tasks, while running only one instance of Semaphore; which also simplifies deployments.

@PeterFalken Thanks for the quick response and ideas. I've experimented with VENVs, mainly building them using UV. That sort of worked fine, except that I couldn't target the different VENVs that I installed and configured through Semaphore. I could switch between them running the Ansible CLI, of course, but not with Semaphore. In my installation I don't have the Runners feature and frankly I hadn't looked into it much in terms of what I thought I wanted/needed. I'll look into it a bit.

Also, I have Semaphore installed from 'native' packages. So, I'm not using the container deployment method, which bundles the various other components with it. To use the container deployment, I'd prefer to see each piece (Semaphore, Ansible, Terraform/OpenTofu, etc.) implemented as separate containers, which could then be versioned individually. That would also potentially allow me to run more than one Ansible container and therefore target a specific Ansible version that way. AFAIK, that's not really a possibility today. But I may have missed something, and if so, I'd be delighted to be corrected. 😃

You might want to take a look at these Dockerfiles:
server
runner
Where you can set the versions for the pieces/tools.