Getting Started with Ansible Module Development on Mac OS X

Ansible is great.

Sometimes though you may need to improve on modules, or patch them, or just create new ones.

Here’s what I did (and would do again) to get started:

• First, go to the IRC channel on freenode (#ansible-devel) and ansible development group (https://groups.google.com/d/forum/ansible-devel) to make sure someone isn’t already working on the feature. I would also browse/search the issues on the github page to see if someone has a related outstanding issue. If you don’t know what IRC/freenode are start here: https://freenode.net/using_the_network.shtml
• If at this point you still want to proceed…read this: https://docs.ansible.com/developing_modules.html
• Clone the main ansible repo. https://github.com/ansible/ansible
• Setup your environment to run against the ansible source you just cloned.

source ansible/hacking/env-setup

• Fork the repo where the module currently lives, either https://github.com/ansible/ansible-modules-core or https://github.com/ansible/ansible-modules-extras. If you’re developing a new module you most likely want to put it in ansible-modules-extras.
• Create a branch to work in.
• Setup your environment to run against these module locations first (if you didn’t do this step ansible would look at the main ansible directory cloned above first.)

export ANSIBLE_LIBRARY=~/ansible-modules-core:~/ansible-modules-extras

• Setup an ansible playbook that uses the module you want to change.
• Confirm the playbook runs before you make changes.
• Make changes to the module.
• Confirm the changes work.
• Commit your changes to your branch.
• Push your changes to your fork.
• Open a PR.

Note: There is a test-module script that you can use to execute a module without writing a playbook. See http://docs.ansible.com/developing_modules.html#testing-modules

In my case, the module I was changing didn’t work with the test-module script, so I used the steps I outlined above.