Customizing Ansible: Ansible Module Creation

Unlocking Ansible’s Potential Through Custom Python Modules

Original author: Nikhil Kumar in https://medium.com/techbeatly/customizing-ansible-ansible-module-creation-c5d5d06b47f8

Introduction

Ansible is a powerful open-source software used for configuration management, provisioning, and application deployment. It belongs to the realm of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), where infrastructure is defined and managed through code. Ansible enables you to create and deploy infrastructure on various platforms, including cloud services like AWS and Azure, as well as hypervisors.

One of the key components that makes Ansible so versatile and extensible is the concept of Ansible Modules. These modules are reusable, standalone units of code designed to perform specific tasks on managed or target nodes. While Ansible modules can be written in any language capable of producing JSON output, Python is the most popular and recommended choice. This is because Ansible itself is written in Python, which makes it seamlessly integrate with JSON data.

In this article, we will explore the steps involved in creating custom Ansible modules using Python. We’ll also provide an example to illustrate the process.