[Ala-portal] Ansible changes removes local caches - intended?

[Tim Robertson [GBIF]]

Hi ALA folks

With this commit: https://github.com/gbif/ala-install/commit/d5b6394f44aa82451079d84f646e200caafbd2a8

Things like the following were removed:

-- name: determine if the application is in our local repo
 -  local_action: stat path={{local_repo_dir}}/{{biocache_service}}.war
 -  register: biocache_war_path
 -
 -- name: fetch application if it is not in our local repo
 -  local_action: get_url url={{biocache_service_url}} dest={{local_repo_dir}}/{{biocache_service}}.war
 -  when: biocache_war_path.stat.exists == false

The original design was to pull the large artifacts to a local directory once (the .ala folder) so that if you were provisioning different environments (locally, uat, production etc) you weren’t troubled with huge download times for each environment.

Was this an oversight perhaps?  In Europe we see 10s of minutes in this stage, hence the original design to cache locally.

If we get into proper maven releases and versioned artifacts deployed to nexus, we can start mirroring nexus repositories to bring back data locality too (plus it’ll use the local .m2 repo directory on the host).

Any thoughts on this?  Would you like me to revert those changes?

Thanks,
Tim