deps Guide

Using deps

The ansible_collections.community.general.plugins.module_utils.deps module util simplifies the importing of code as described in Importing and using shared code. Please notice that deps is meant to be used specifically with Ansible modules, and not other types of plugins.

The same example from the Developer Guide would become:

from ansible_collections.community.general.plugins.module_utils import deps


with deps.declare("foo"):
    import foo

Then in main(), just after the argspec (or anywhere in the code, for that matter), do

deps.validate(module)  # assuming module is a valid AnsibleModule instance

By default, deps will rely on ansible.module_utils.basic.missing_required_lib to generate a message about a failing import. That function accepts parameters reason and url, and and so does deps`:

with deps.declare("foo", reason="foo is needed to properly bar", url="https://foo.bar.io"):
    import foo

If you would rather write a custom message instead of using missing_required_lib then do:

with deps.declare("foo", msg="Custom msg explaining why foo is needed"):
    import foo

deps allows for multiple dependencies to be declared:

with deps.declare("foo"):
    import foo

with deps.declare("bar"):
    import bar

with deps.declare("doe"):
    import doe

By default, deps.validate() will check on all the declared dependencies, but if so desired, they can be validated selectively by doing:

deps.validate(module, "foo")       # only validates the "foo" dependency

deps.validate(module, "doe:bar")   # only validates the "doe" and "bar" dependencies

deps.validate(module, "-doe:bar")  # validates all dependencies except "doe" and "bar"

New in version 6.1.0.