You are reading an unmaintained version of the Ansible documentation. Unmaintained Ansible versions can contain unfixed security vulnerabilities (CVE). Please upgrade to a maintained version. See the latest Ansible documentation.

Modules

Enabling modules
Using modules

Modules are the main building blocks of Ansible playbooks. Although we do not generally speak of “module plugins”, a module is a type of plugin. For a developer-focused description of the differences between modules and other plugins, see Modules and plugins: what is the difference?.

Enabling modules 

You can enable a custom module by dropping it into one of these locations:

any directory added to the ANSIBLE_LIBRARY environment variable ($ANSIBLE_LIBRARY takes a colon-separated list like $PATH)
~/.ansible/plugins/modules/
/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules/

For more information on using local custom modules, see Adding a module outside of a collection.

Using modules 

For information on using modules in ad hoc tasks, see Introduction to ad hoc commands. For information on using modules in playbooks, see Intro to playbooks.

See also

Intro to playbooks: An introduction to playbooks
Developing Ansible modules: An introduction to creating Ansible modules
Developing collections: An guide to creating Ansible collections
User Mailing List: Have a question? Stop by the google group!
irc.libera.chat: #ansible-devel IRC chat channel