diff --git a/roles/bodhi2/backend/files/alembic b/roles/bodhi2/backend/files/alembic
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..a103e607e0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/roles/bodhi2/backend/files/alembic
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+#!/usr/bin/python2
+
+# NOTE - we hotfix this with ansible so we can do alembic with a forward-compat
+# el7 package for webob.  -- threebean
+
+__requires__ = __main__.__requires__ = ['WebOb>=1.4.1', 'alembic']
+import sys
+from pkg_resources import load_entry_point
+
+if __name__ == '__main__':
+    sys.exit(load_entry_point('alembic', 'console_scripts', 'alembic')())
diff --git a/roles/bodhi2/backend/tasks/main.yml b/roles/bodhi2/backend/tasks/main.yml
index 9681b8a184..469aa458a8 100644
--- a/roles/bodhi2/backend/tasks/main.yml
+++ b/roles/bodhi2/backend/tasks/main.yml
@@ -32,6 +32,12 @@
   - packages
   - bodhi
 
+- name: hotfix /usr/bin/alembic to use our webob forward compat package
+  copy: src=alembic dest=/usr/bin/alembic
+  tags:
+  - hotfix
+  - bodhi
+
 - name: add masher group
   group: name=masher gid=751 system=yes state=present
   tags: