About Modules

Introduction

Ansible ships with a number of modules (called the 'module library') that can be executed directly on remote hosts or through Playbooks <playbooks>.

Users can also write their own modules. These modules can control system resources, like services, packages, or files (anything really), or handle executing system commands.

Let's review how we execute three different modules from the command line:

ansible webservers -m service -a "name=httpd state=running"
ansible webservers -m ping
ansible webservers -m command -a "/sbin/reboot -t now"

Each module supports taking arguments. Nearly all modules take key=value arguments, space delimited. Some modules take no arguments, and the command/shell modules simply take the string of the command you want to run.

From playbooks, Ansible modules are executed in a very similar way:

- name: reboot the servers
  action: command /sbin/reboot -t now

Which can be abbreviated to:

- name: reboot the servers
  command: /sbin/reboot -t now

All modules technically return JSON format data, though if you are using the command line or playbooks, you don't really need to know much about that. If you're writing your own module, you care, and this means you do not have to write modules in any particular language -- you get to choose.

Modules are idempotent, meaning they will seek to avoid changes to the system unless a change needs to be made. When using Ansible playbooks, these modules can trigger 'change events' in the form of notifying 'handlers' to run additional tasks.

Documentation for each module can be accessed from the command line with the ansible-doc tool:

ansible-doc yum

intro_adhoc: Examples of using modules in /usr/bin/ansible
playbooks: Examples of using modules with /usr/bin/ansible-playbook
developing_modules: How to write your own modules
developing_api: Examples of using modules with the Python API
Mailing List: Questions? Help? Ideas? Stop by the list on Google Groups
irc.freenode.net: #ansible IRC chat channel

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About Modules

Introduction

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