If you cannot locate a plugin that suits your needs by using Ansible, you can easily extend the default functionality by creating your own python module. In this article I will explain the procedure for the creation of a module.
First of all you should create a python code and use Ansible SDK. A detailed description for the creation of the development environment can be found on official documentation.
The example module is a hello world, that gets as an input your name, surname and prints a hello message.
Copy your hello.py on ansible modules location. On my working machine this is the path /usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/ansible/modules
When you include your documentation on the python file, you can explore it with:
ansible-doc hello
If you try a module run without the required parameters, it will fail as shown below:
Run your custom module by using the below playbook:
Input with only name as parameter:
---
- name: test playbook using custom code
hosts: localhost
tasks:
- name: using my custom module
hello:
name: Gerasimos
register: result
- name: show output
debug:
var: result
Input with name and surname as parameters:
---
- name: test playbook using custom code
hosts: localhost
tasks:
- name: using my custom module
hello:
name: Gerasimos
surname: Alexiou
register: result
- name: show output
debug:
var: result
Code for the example module can be found on my github repo.
