Ansible collection meant for centralizing deployment logic for EPICS IOC instances.

The nsls2.ioc_deploy collection expects to be used in tandem with two other repositories; one with the playbooks that call these roles with some input parameters, and another repository for storing IOC instance configurations.

The collection includes several core central roles that are shared by all deployments, and then one role per type of IOC/hardware, found under roles/. Each IOC type also has a vars file for overriding default behaviors in roles/deploy_ioc/vars/. Any required EPICS modules can be automatically built by the install_module role. The configured modules can be seen at roles/install_module/vars/.

If you require an EPICS module as a dependency, but don't plan on deploying it as an IOC, then you can make only the module.

pixi run make-module

Follow the prompts to get started. See install_module for a full reference on supported options.

You can then add this module to the module_deps of any device role.

If you have a new EPICS module that you also plan to deploy as an IOC, then you can make a device role. This will also prompt you to make the installable module.

pixi run make-role

Follow the prompts to get started. See deploy_ioc and install_module for full references on supported options. Furthermore, if a similar device exists (it probably does), then browse the device_roles before starting.

There are a few required items to help make this repository more maintainable. They are:

• a schema.yml defining how to configure the role for deployment
• an example.yml to demonstrate a working example

You can deploy your example.yml easily. Please see the section on Local Testing.

Simply make changes to the device role and submit a pull request to this repository. Breaking changes to existing schemas will need to be justified.

If you require a new version of the IOC, you will need to add a new installable module with that specific Git commit hash. Then, you can override the deploy_ioc_required_module of the existing device role to point to this new installable module.

If the newest version is not a major release (i.e. does not contain breaking changes), then you can likely update the existing installable module to use the new Git commit hash. Be sure to extensively test with real hardware before and after doing this.

You can update the module by running:

pixi run update-module

This requires pixi and docker or podman.

To get the latest EPICS container for local testing:

docker login ghcr.io
docker pull ghcr.io/nsls2/epics-alma8:latest
docker run -dit --name epics-dev ghcr.io/nsls2/epics-alma8:latest

Test IOC role locally against an EPICS container:

pixi run test-role <role-name>

Run using pixi run <command>.