Roadmap¶

I've opened a few issues around some future plans for alai. If you are interested or have thoughts on some of these features please post a comment to them. Some issues have some of my thoughts and ideas already posted while others are just simple placeholders until I get to them.

• Index authentication (#64): Support indexes that require authentication.
• Collection project metadata (#65): Replace galaxy.yml with metadata stored in alai.toml for collection based projects. Will allow alai add/alai remove to manage collection dependencies. Will require build support, see below.
• Building collections (#66): Adds an alai build command that can build a collection using rules and logic defined in alai. Opens up support for other compression methods like Zstandard, and supporting a collection project alai.toml over galaxy.yml.
• Publishing collections (#67): Support publishing collections/ taking over the default sync for a collection to Alai. Also includes features like OIDC support and a pre-cursor for supporting signatures and attestation of artifacts.
• Manage Ansible and Python deps (#68): Provide a mechanism to manage Ansible and other Python dependencies as defined in alai.toml or some other metadata file. This might end up delegating to uv or some other tool using the generic pylock.toml lock file or some other mechanism. A lot of moving parts here but would enable alai to orchestrate the whole environment and take into account the actual Ansible version when downloading dependencies.
• Include Python/Bin deps in index (#69): Collections do have a way to specify their Python and system dependencies in the collection itself. We could include this data in the index to make it easier to manage. The Python deps might be required for alai to manage the Python deps with Ansible as set out above.
• Meta/set collection data (#70): Support publicly defined meta/set collections that can provide a range or pinned set of collections under a common name. This would be independent of indexes so that anyone can define a grouping of collections for their use case and share them.
• requirements.yml (#71): Support importing collections from an existing requirements.yml into alai.toml or just with installing with alai collection install -r. Some hairy edge cases around source and signatures and how to handle them.
• Excluding newer versions (#72): A way for alai to ignore newly released collections until a set date has passed. Excluding newer versions helps to reproduce an old lock or hold back releases until they've been out a while and vetted by others first.
• Signature/attestation (#73): Support storing signatures and provide a way for callers to attest an artifact using alai. Most likely requires publishing to be in place already.