Add Option to Disable Content Installation in Project Settings

[jangel97]

Please confirm the following

• I agree to follow this project's code of conduct.
• I have checked the current issues for duplicates.
• I understand that AWX is open source software provided for free and that I might not receive a timely response.

Feature type

New Feature

Feature Summary

Desired Feature

I propose a new feature for AWX - an option in the project settings to disable the installation of Ansible roles and collections.

Use Case

The primary use case for this feature is for projects with a large number of roles and collections. Currently, AWX updates and installs these dependencies for each project update, which can be time-consuming and, in some cases, unnecessary.

This feature would allow users to choose when to update their project dependencies, offering more control and potentially reducing the time taken to update a project.

Proposed Solution

Add a checkbox or similar control in the AWX project settings UI that sets whether or not to update roles and collections. This control should be set to 'enabled' by default to maintain the current behavior.

When disabled, AWX should not update or install roles and collections for that specific project.

This user control would need to be propagated to the project_update Ansible playbook (https://github.com/ansible/awx/blob/devel/awx/playbooks/project_update.yml), controlling the roles_enabled and collections_enabled variables as appropriate.

Alternatives

The current alternative is to manually modify the roles_enabled and collections_enabled variables in the playbook, but this is less intuitive and accessible to users.

Select the relevant components

• UI
• API
• Docs
• Collection
• CLI
• Other

Steps to reproduce

Currently no way to control the installation of content in a project sync is provided out of the box

Current results

Currently no way to control the installation of content in a project sync is provided out of the box

Sugested feature result

A way to control the installation of content in a project sync is provided out of the box

Additional information

No response

[jangel97]

Another interesting option/opinion. To streamline project updates and reduce the load on the Galaxy server, what if ansible-galaxy checks for existing content before downloading? If the local content matches the remote version, it could skip the download. However, if there's a discrepancy between the local and remote versions, it would initiate a pull. This approach mirrors how containers operate and could significantly optimize AAP project updates while alleviating the strain on Galaxy servers.