Ansible Molecule, how to use the local copy of the dependencies

The community.okd collection depends on kubernetes.core. It uses Molecule to run the tests. We can call it using either the Makefile and the make molecule command. We can also install molecule manually with pip and run it with molecule test.

When I work on community.okd, I often need to also adjust the kubernetes.core collection. By default Molecule fetches the dependencies silently from internet. This is done during either the prerun or the dependency steps. The mechanism is handy when you focus on one single collection at a time. But in my case, it's a bit annoying. The clean copy of kubernetes.core overwrites my local changes and prevents the testing of my local copy of the dependency.

This is how I ensure Molecule uses my local copy of the collections. I store them in the default location ~/.ansible/collections/ansible_collections.

In molecule/default/molecule.yml I set the following key to turn off the prerun:

prerun: false

and I set the following block in the dependency: section:

 dependency:
   name: galaxy
   enabled: False

This will turn off the dependency resolver. Molecule won't call galaxy anymore to fetch the roles and the collections defined in the galaxy.yml.

You're done; as a bonus, the startup of molecule should be slightly faster!