Ansible 1.8.2 custom windows powershell module defined in roles/myrole/library is not found (ERROR: mymodule is not a legal parameter in an Ansible task or handler)

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1

Hi everyone,

I wonder if anyone has hit this issue. I just upgraded to ansible 1.8.2 and a set of windows playbooks is no longer working. These playbooks do work with the previous version we had; there seem to be some issues around this at the moment.

The problem appears to be related to how ansible locates custom powershell modules defined in a roles library.

Lets look at how the play is laid out, its quite simple:

/roles/myrole/tasks/main.yml

  • name: Run my custom module
    mymodule: myparam=‘hello world’

/roles/myrole/library/mymodule.ps1
… a custom powershell module

/myplay.yml

  • name: MYROLE
    hosts: my-servers
    gather_facts: no
    vars_files:
  • “{{versions_vars_file}}”
  • “{{environment_vars_file}}”
    roles:
  • myrole

lets invoke ansible:
ansible-playbook -i inventory myplay.yml -c winrm

ERROR: mymodule is not a legal parameter in an Ansible task or handler

This worked in 1.7.x

I should point out that I am setting both ‘ansible_connection’ to winrm and passing ‘-c winrm’ in the command line. I would expect powershell modules to be found.

This seems to be a bug in how find_plugin() in /ansible/utils/plugins.py is invoked. When I patched the function to log the value of transport parameter I got:

transport: [‘.py’]
transport: [‘.py’, ‘’]
transport: [‘.py’, ‘’]

So it was an empty string and the suffix was always ‘.py’.

If I patch the 1.8.2 find_plugin() function to add ‘.ps1’ to the suffix list (even when transport is empty) then my problem goes away - I guess, that transport should probably not be empty?

Thanks
Ian

2

Create an empty mymodule.py file alongside mymodule.ps1; that should allow the playbook to determine that mymodule is a valid module name.

3

Chris,

You nailed it in one!! thanks for heads up!