Ansible-core 2.18 Porting Guide 

This section discusses the behavioral changes between ansible-core 2.17 and ansible-core 2.18.

It is intended to assist in updating your playbooks, plugins and other parts of your Ansible infrastructure so they will work with this version of Ansible.

We suggest you read this page along with ansible-core Changelog for 2.18 to understand what updates you may need to make.

This document is part of a collection on porting. The complete list of porting guides can be found at porting guides.

Playbook 

No notable changes

Command Line 

Python 3.10 is a no longer supported control node version. Python 3.11+ is now required for running Ansible.
Python 3.7 is a no longer supported remote version. Python 3.8+ is now required for target execution.

Deprecated 

No notable changes

Modules 

No notable changes

Modules removed 

The following modules no longer exist:

No notable changes

Deprecation notices 

No notable changes

Noteworthy module changes 

No notable changes

Plugins 

The ssh connection plugin now officially supports targeting Windows hosts. A breaking change that has been made as part of this official support is the low level command execution done by plugins like ansible.builtin.raw and action plugins calling _low_level_execute_command is no longer wrapped with a powershell.exe wrapped invocation. These commands will now be executed directly on the target host using the default shell configuration set on the Windows host. This change is done to simplify the configuration required on the Ansible side, make module execution more efficient, and to remove the need to decode stderr CLIXML output. A consequence of this change is that ansible.builtin.raw commands are no longer guaranteed to be run through a PowerShell shell and with the output encoding of UTF-8. To run a command through PowerShell and with UTF-8 output support, use the ansible.windows.win_shell or ansible.windows.win_powershell module instead.
```
- name: Run with win_shell
  ansible.windows.win_shell: Write-Host "Hello, Café"

- name: Run with win_powershell
  ansible.windows.win_powershell:
    script: Write-Host "Hello, Café"
```

Porting custom scripts 

No notable changes

Networking 

No notable changes