Ansible Collections Must Be Declared for CI

The Problem

community.general.ufw works locally but CI fails with:

couldn't resolve module/action 'community.general.ufw'

Local machine has collections from previous projects cached. CI runner starts clean — nothing pre-installed.

The Fix

# requirements.yml
collections:
  - name: community.general
    version: ">=8.0.0"
  - name: ansible.posix
    version: ">=1.5.0"

# .github/workflows/ci.yml
- name: Install collections
  run: ansible-galaxy collection install -r requirements.yml

Add this step before ansible-lint runs. That's it.

Why It Matters

Environment	Without requirements.yml	With requirements.yml
Local machine	Works (cached)	Works
CI runner	Fails	Works
Fresh install	Fails	Works

requirements.yml is to Ansible what package.json is to Node — the explicit contract between your code and its dependencies. "Works on my machine" is not a declaration.

Related

• eigenbase — Ansible Workstation Provisioning