Creating Custom Ansible Plugins to Fetch API Data Easily

Step-by-Step Guide to Extend Ansible Functionality with Custom Plugins

Ansible is a powerful automation tool used for configuration management, application deployment, and task automation. While it comes with a rich set of modules and plugins, there are times when you might need to extend its capabilities by writing custom plugins. In this article, we will walk you through the process of creating a custom Ansible plugin to retrieve user data from an API endpoint.

Why Create a Custom Plugin?

Creating a custom plugin allows you to:

• Extend Ansible’s functionality to meet specific needs.
• Integrate with external APIs that are not covered by existing modules.
• Simplify complex tasks by encapsulating them in reusable plugins.

Our Goal

We will create a custom lookup plugin that fetches a list of users from https://reqres.in/api/users?page=2 and makes this data available for use in Ansible playbooks.

Prerequisites

• Basic understanding of Ansible and Python.