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Ansible is developed and released on a flexible 4 months release cycle. This cycle can be extended in order to allow for larger changes to be properly implemented and tested before a new release is made available.
Ansible has a graduated support structure that extends to three major releases. For more information, read about the Development and stable version maintenance workflow or see the chart in Release status for the degrees to which current releases are supported.
Note
Support for three major releases began with Ansible-2.4. Ansible-2.3 and older versions are only supported for two releases.
If you are using a release of Ansible that is no longer supported, we strongly encourage you to upgrade as soon as possible in order to benefit from the latest features and security fixes.
Older, unsupported versions of Ansible can contain unfixed security vulnerabilities (CVE).
You can refer to the porting guides for tips on updating your Ansible playbooks to run on newer versions.
| Ansible Release | Latest Version | Status |
|---|---|---|
| devel | 2.6 (unreleased, trunk) | In development |
| 2.5 | 2.5.4 (2018-05-31) | Supported (security and general bugfixes) |
| 2.4 | 2.4.4 (2018-01-31) | Supported (security and critical bug fixes) |
| 2.3 | 2.3.3 (2017-12-20) | Unsupported (end of life) |
| 2.2 | 2.2.3 (2017-05-09) | Unsupported (end of life) |
| 2.1 | 2.1.6 (2017-06-01) | Unsupported (end of life) |
| 2.0 | 2.0.2 (2016-04-19) | Unsupported (end of life) |
| 1.9 | 1.9.6 (2016-04-15) | Unsupported (end of life) |
| <1.9 | n/a | Unsupported (end of life) |
Note
Starting with Ansible-2.4, support lasts for 3 releases. Thus Ansible-2.4 will receive security and general bug fixes when it is first released, security and critical bug fixes when 2.5 is released, and only security fixes once 2.6 is released.
The Ansible community develops and maintains Ansible on GitHub.
New modules, plugins, features and bugfixes will always be integrated in what will become the next
major version of Ansible. This work is tracked on the devel git branch.
Ansible provides bugfixes and security improvements for the most recent major release. The previous
major release will only receive fixes for security issues and critical bugs. Ansible only applies
security fixes to releases which are two releases old. This work is tracked on the
stable-<version> git branches.
Note
Support for three major releases began with Ansible-2.4. Ansible-2.3 and older versions are only supported for two releases with the first stage including both security and general bug fixes while the second stage includes security and critical bug fixes
The fixes that land in supported stable branches will eventually be released as a new version when necessary.
Note that while there are no guarantees for providing fixes for unsupported releases of Ansible, there can sometimes be exceptions for critical issues.
Since 2.5, we’ve logged changes to stable-<version> git branches at stable-<version>/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v<version>.rst.
For example, here’s the changelog for 2.5 on GitHub.
Older versions logged changes to stable-<version>/CHANGELOG.md. For example,
here’s the CHANGELOG for 2.4.
Before a new release or version of Ansible can be done, it will typically go through a release candidate process.
This provides the Ansible community the opportunity to test Ansible and report bugs or issues they might come across.
Ansible tags the first release candidate (RC1) which is usually scheduled
to last five business days. The final release is done if no major bugs or
issues are identified during this period.
If there are major problems with the first candidate, a second candidate will
be tagged (RC2) once the necessary fixes have landed.
This second candidate lasts for a shorter duration than the first.
If no problems have been reported after two business days, the final release is
done.
More release candidates can be tagged as required, so long as there are bugs that the Ansible core maintainers consider should be fixed before the final release.
While there is a pending release candidate, the focus of core developers and maintainers will on fixes towards the release candidate.
Merging new features or fixes that are not related to the release candidate may be delayed in order to allow the new release to be shipped as soon as possible.
Sometimes we need to remove a feature, normally in favor of a reimplementation that we hope does a better job. To do this we have a deprecation cycle. First we mark a feature as ‘deprecated’. This is normally accompanied with warnings to the user as to why we deprecated it, what alternatives they should switch to and when (which version) we are scheduled to remove the feature permanently.
The cycle is normally across 4 feature releases (2.x.y, where the x marks a feature release and the y a bugfix release), so the feature is normally removed in the 4th release after we announce the deprecation. For example, something deprecated in 2.5 will be removed in 2.9, assuming we don’t jump to 3.x before that point. The tracking is tied to the number of releases, not the release numbering.
For modules/plugins, we keep the documentation after the removal for users of older versions.
See also