To simplify the packaging workflow a few of us have been working on a tool to automate a lot of the workflows.
We also have docs at Obal: Packaging Wrapper Using Ansible — Obal 0.11.0 documentation for the unreleased version. Soon we’ll have the 0.1.0 release which improves the discoverability a lot by adding help texts. All the command docs are autogenerated from the source.
Under the hood Obal is a Python wrapper around Ansible. All the application logic is pure Python having minimal external dependencies (only ansible >= 2.5). Then it has a directory with Ansible playbooks, roles and modules with the actual business logic. Variables are exposed via the command line to influence the behavior.
After 0.1.0 is released I’ll give more instructions about how to use it, but consider this the pre-announcement.