Ansible Role: EPICS

This Ansible role installs the EPICS Base, selected EPICS support modules, areadetector, and areadetector iocs on Debian and RedHat/CentOS-based systems.

Requirements

• Ansible 2.9+
• Git

Example Playbook

This example playbook will the ADAndor IOC and all epics components required to support it.

- name: epics
  hosts: all
  roles:
    - role: epics
      vars:
      areadetector_iocs:
        ADAndor: master

An example inventory.ini and playbook.yaml are included. Note that the default install path is /epics, therefore the install must be run with escalated privileges (or the install dir modified).

$ ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini playbook.yaml

Role Variables

Location Variables

These variables should be defined in your playbook or inventory:

Variable	Description	Default
epics_dir	Directory to install EPICS	/epics
epics_version	EPICS Base version to install	R7.0.8.1
epics_host_arch	Target architecture for EPICS (e.g., linux-x86_64)	Auto-detected

Support Modules

Support modules required for areadetector will be installed by default. You change the selection of which support modules to install, and their versions, by setting install_modules, for example:

install_modules:
  asyn: "R4-44"

Support modules are installed in the order specified. This is important, as there are cross-dependencies. See the defaults in defaults/main.yml for a typical install sequence.

Dependency Variables

Variable	Description	Default
use_tirpc	Uses libtirpc as a provider of RPC related symbols (recommended on newer environments)	yes
use_xml2	Uses libxml2 as a provider of xml related symbols (recommended on newer environments)	yes

IOC Variables

By default, no areadetector IOCs will be installed. You must specify desired iocs (and versions) in the areadetector_iocs variable.

areadetector_iocs:
  ADAndor: master

For Developers

To accelerate local development of this role, you may use act to run the test workflow locally in an isolated docker container. The steps for this are:

• Install Docker Desktop
• Download act and extract into this project directory
• Run ./act
• (First run only) Select the "Medium" image as the default

Act then execute the workflow in an isolated environment, running the playbook at .github/playbooks/test-playbook.yaml.

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This repo was forked from infn-epics/epics-ansible-role, which provides a role for installing epics base and certain support IOCs. This repo is an extension and refactoring of that to support areadetector and IOC installation.