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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 or plugin 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 Ansible playbooks.

See also

Ansible playbooks: An introduction to playbooks
Developing modules: An introduction to creating Ansible modules
Developing collections: An guide to creating Ansible collections
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