Ansible win_ntp Module in community.windows

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One common tasks when provisioning Windows servers is configuring time synchronization. Accurate timekeeping is critical for logs, authentication, and distributed systems — yet, surprisingly, there’s currently no dedicated NTP module available for Windows in Ansible.

When reviewing the Ansible community.windows collection, I came across an existing pull request that would introduce exactly this functionality (see PR #150). Unfortunately, it was never merged.

Our team has tried to help move this forward:

  • We reached out in the original PR discussion to ask if it could be reconsidered.
  • We contacted the maintainer directly via email.
  • We even offered to take on maintenance of the module ourselves, since this is a feature our company — and likely many others — relies on.

So far, we haven’t been able to get a response.

That brings me to this post:
We’d like to ask again — would it be possible to add this module to the community.windows collection? Configuring NTP is a standard provisioning step for Windows servers, and having an official Ansible way to handle it would be extremely valuable for the wider community.

If others are also interested in this, please let us know.

Thanks in advance

Please see PR #150:

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In the PR, the maintainer says

Closing due to the age of the PR. If someone wishes to continue with the work they can submit a new PR with the changes requested added in.

Have you tried opening a new PR?

@jborean is on the forum and seems active in the collection. I’m sure if you opened a PR you would get some feedback.

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Right now I would love to accept new PRs but nothing has really changed from a maintenance perspective. The community.windows collection mostly just sits there and while I do go through PRs that are submitted for bugfixes or features for existing modules I do not have the capacity to work on any reported issues. Any new module there just adds even more burdens on maintaining it as it expands the scope, potentially more people raise issues that don’t get anywhere leading to more frustration. It also expands the test suite leading to more resources having to be spent to run CI and spin up Windows hosts. Another problem with testing is when we add new features like PowerShell 7, it takes a long time to validate each module and fix up the various tests for changes in between the versions.

I really do sympathise and maybe sometime in the future we can revisit this once things are stabilised or there’s a push for more community involvement but if we were to accept new features the collection just continues to grow and grow and become even more unmanageable for myself.

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