Chapter 7.  Creating a Custom Module

This chapter will focus on how to write and test custom modules. We've already discussed how modules work and how to use them within your tasks. Well, just for a quick recap, a module in Ansible is a piece of code, which is transferred and executed on your remote host every time you run an Ansible task (it can also run locally if you've used local_action).

From my experience, I've seen custom modules being written whenever a certain functionality needs to be exposed as a first-class task. The same functionality could have been achieved without the module, but it would have required a series of tasks with existing modules to accomplish the end goal and often also command and shell modules. For example, let's say you wanted to provision a server via Preboot Execution Environment (PXE). Without a custom module, you would have probably used a few shell or command tasks to accomplish the same. However, with a custom module, you would just pass the required...