Develop your own Ansible module in 15 minutes.

Getting Started

The list is of Ansible modules is extensive (see Related section below), but it might be the case where you have automate a task, which is not supported by Ansible out of the box.

This post covers the basics of developing your own Ansible module. I will use Python to write a module which multiplies two given numbers. Let´s start!

Folder Structure

Ansible requires that the module is stored at /library/custom_module_name.py at the same level where the playbook is located. In the following example, the playbook is called “main.yaml” and the customer module “multiply.py” is located in the /library/ folder.

Ansible recommends to include strings for DOCUMENTATION and EXAMPLES at the top of our module code.

DOCUMENTATION = '''
---
module: multiply
short_description: Multiply two given numbers
'''

EXAMPLES = '''
tasks:
- multiply:
    a: 200
    b: 10
  register: result
- debug: var=result
'''

The key part is to import the boilerplate code from ansible.module_utils.basic like this:

from ansible.module_utils.basic import AnsibleModule
if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

The AnsibleModule provides lots of common code for handling returns, parses your arguments for you, and allows you to check inputs.

Let’s run the playbook and check the result:

Related

• Ansible Modules - List of Ansible modules