agru

July 29, 2026 · View on GitHub

What?
Why?
How?
Non-interactive mode
What's the catch?
Where to get?
Who uses it?

What?

ansible-galaxy requirements updater. A drop-in ansible-galaxy replacement that's fast and doesn't argue with you:

update requirements.yml when a newer git tag (role version) shows up
reinstall a role only when its version actually changed in requirements
install missing roles
fully backwards-compatible with ansible-galaxy, down to the odd trailing space it leaves in the installed roles' meta/.galaxy_install_info

We at etke.cc maintain a pile of Ansible roles and playbooks (MDAD, MASH, etke.cc). We wrote A.G.R.U. because ansible-galaxy is slow, very slow. And irrational. And it skips things you'd expect it to just do:

Bumped a role's version in requirements? ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml -p roles/galaxy/ won't install it. You get to add --force or delete the dir by hand. agru just does it.
Got 100500 roles and want to know which ones have a newer tag? Checking by hand is your evening gone. agru checks all of them at once.
Installs drag on forever? agru does the same work in a fraction of the time.

It started as a maintainer's tool, then turned out to be useful for everyone. Our playbooks ship a just update command (maintainers: just update -u) that updates the playbook and installs every role. And it's fast.

How?

Most of the time you just run it. Install everything missing from your requirements file:

$ agru

List what's installed:

$ agru -l

Update requirements to the newest available tags:

$ agru -u

Remove an installed role:

$ agru -d traefik

That covers the daily driving. The full set of flags:

Usage of agru:
  -c	cleanup temporary files (default true)
  -d string
    	delete installed role, all other flags are ignored
  -i	install missing roles (default true)
  -k	keep TUI open after completion until 'q'
  -l	list installed roles
  -limit int
    	limit the number of parallel downloads (affects roles installation only). 0 - no limit (default)
  -no-tui
    	force non-interactive logging output (no TUI)
  -p string
    	path to install roles (default "roles/galaxy/")
  -r string
    	ansible-galaxy requirements file (default "requirements.yml")
  -u	update requirements file if newer versions are available
  -v	print version and exit
  -verbose
    	verbose output
  -version
    	print version and exit

Non-interactive mode

agru draws a TUI when it has a terminal to draw on. Pipe it, redirect it, or run it in CI, and that TUI just garbles your log with escape codes. So when stdout isn't a terminal, agru skips the TUI and logs plain text instead: one line per role, errors on stderr, everything else on stdout.

Want the plain output from a real terminal too? Force it:

$ agru -no-tui

One difference from the TUI, and it's in your favor: the plain path checks whether things actually worked. If it can't write your updated requirements.yml, or can't create the roles directory, it says so on stderr and exits non-zero. The TUI swallows both and exits like nothing happened. If you're scripting agru, this is the mode you want.

What's the catch?

Think A.G.R.U. is too good to be true? It's true, it just has limits:

only git repos are supported

does not work:

- src: geerlingguy.docker
  version: 6.1.0

does work:

- src: git+https://github.com/geerlingguy/ansible-role-docker
  name: geerlingguy.docker
  version: 6.1.0

$ brew tap etkecc/agru https://github.com/etkecc/agru
$ brew install agru

Build yourself

just build or go build .

Who uses it?

If you use A.G.R.U. in your project, please let us know by creating an issue or PR with your project link.

agru

What?

Why?

How?

Non-interactive mode

What's the catch?

only git repos are supported

only roles are supported

only list/update/install/remove operations are supported

Where to get?

Binaries and distro-specific packages

Homebrew

Build yourself

Who uses it?