Setting Up the Ansible Module Development Environment

In this section, we will discuss how to set up a local Linux environment for Ansible module development. In our specific implementation, we will look at how to do this in Ubuntu. However, the same set of configuration options should work under other Linux flavors as well. As new Ansible module developers, we will want to begin by understanding how to configure our system to best support Ansible development, how to setup the modules path, and how to configure the environment for testing.

The first step to getting a development environment up and running is to understand the Ansible library path on the system. This path is where Ansible will search for additional libraries. The default value for the library path is defined within the primary Ansible configuration file (/etc/ansible/ansible.cfg). The line item is shown as follows:

library = /usr/share/ansible

While the default path is defined within the Ansible configuration file, it can be...