tutorial.md

Quick Tutorial: Creating an Ansible Collection Module

This tutorial guides you through the process of installing Ansible, creating a new Ansible collection, and adding a custom module to it.

1. Install Ansible

Use pip to install Ansible:

pip install ansible

2. Create an Ansible Collection

Initialize a new collection with the namespace devconf and collection name ansible_workshop. This command sets up the structure for your collection:

~/.local/bin/ansible-galaxy collection init devconf.ansible_workshop

3. Navigate to the Collection Directory

Change to the newly created collection directory:

cd devconf/ansible_workshop/

4. Access the Plugins Directory

Within the collection, navigate to the plugins directory:

cd plugins/

5. Create a Modules Directory

Inside the plugins directory, create a directory named modules where your custom modules will reside:

mkdir modules

6. Create Your New Module

Move into the modules directory and create a new Python file for your module:

cd modules
cp ../../../../mitwpustudent.py

Edit the mitwpustudent.py file to implement your module’s functionality.

7. Copy Code

From here, you can navigate to opensourceops/developing_ansible_modules to find the custom module code.

8. Copy the Collection to the Ansible Directory

Finally, copy your collection to the Ansible collections directory:

cd ~/.ansible
mkdir -p collections/ansible_collections
cd collections/ansible_collections
cp  -r ~/devconf .

Now, let's create a playbook to use the module.