# Ansible.windows vs community.windows and how to remove a collection?

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-windows-vs-community-windows-and-how-to-remove-a-collection/2888>\
**Category:** Get Help\
**Tags:** windows, collections, galaxy-ng\
**Created:** [December 13, 2023, 3:47pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-windows-vs-community-windows-and-how-to-remove-a-collection/2888 "2023-12-13T15:47:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Adam839](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/ansible/user_avatar/forum.ansible.com/adam839/32/1782_2.png) [@Adam839](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Adam839)\
**Post date:** [December 13, 2023, 3:47pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-windows-vs-community-windows-and-how-to-remove-a-collection/2888/1 "2023-12-13T15:47:16Z")

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I am confused by both of them. I have been installing both as I am not sure if they are the same thing or different. I assume different now because ansible.windows is version 2.2.0 and community.windows is 2.1.0. I installed both of them using ansible.galaxy but recently tried to remove community.windows because it was older but even after rm -rf ~/.ansible/collections/ansible\_collections/community , I still see it with ansible-galaxy collection list.

So which should we be using and how do you remove a collection properly? Or are both ansible.windows and collection.windows somehow tied together?

This is on Rocky Linux 9.3 fully updated.

# ansible-galaxy collection list

ansible.posix 1.5.4  
ansible.windows 2.2.0  
community.general 7.2.1  
community.windows 2.1.0

[ansible@ode-ansible02]$ ansible --version  
ansible [core 2.14.9]  
config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg  
configured module search path = [‘/home/ansible/.ansible/plugins/modules’, ‘/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules’]  
ansible python module location = /usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/ansible  
ansible collection location = /home/ansible/.ansible/collections:/usr/share/ansible/collections  
executable location = /usr/bin/ansible  
python version = 3.9.18 (main, Sep 7 2023, 00:00:00) [GCC 11.4.1 20230605 (Red Hat 11.4.1-2)] (/usr/bin/python3)  
jinja version = 3.1.2  
libyaml = True

I only have ansible-core installed from the OS/Stream packages.  
[ansible@ode-ansible02]$ rpm -qa|grep ansible  
ansible-core-2.14.9-1.el9.x86\_64

I also used pip to install pywinrm

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**Author:** ![ptn](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/ansible/user_avatar/forum.ansible.com/ptn/32/481_2.png) [@ptn](https://forum.ansible.com/u/ptn)\
**Post date:** [December 13, 2023, 7:41pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-windows-vs-community-windows-and-how-to-remove-a-collection/2888/2 "2023-12-13T19:41:22Z")

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Hi,

> I am not sure if they are the same thing or different

Not the same thing, but some modules / plugins could potentially overlap, or so it seems. I’d say they are complementary.  
In a more general sense, community collections are supported by community; a fair amount of them are shipped with Ansible package (ansible-core + bells and whistle).

Now ansible.windows doesn’t seem to be builtin (maintained by core devs), but it sure looks like it; difference is you can’t list or properly remove Ansible builtin collections.  
At least that’s my comprehension of it; someone please correct me if I’m wrong.

> how do you remove a collection properly?

I don’t know if there’s a proper way to do it, but `ansible-galaxy` doesn’t seem to have a corresponding parameter. Removing the folder corresponding to collection namespace is a good option IMO (and does work on my end).

Now for your issue, I think there might be a mismatch somewhere on your collections paths. Could you run those commands:

- `ansible-config dump | grep COLLECTIONS_PATHS`
- `ansible-galaxy collection list | grep -E '^#'`

(and yes, I know `ansible --version` indicates collections paths on “ansible collection location” line, but there might be some setups when it doesn’t show the correct paths)

> I only have ansible-core installed from the OS/Stream packages.  
> [ansible@ode-ansible02]$ rpm -qa|grep ansible  
> ansible-core-2.14.9-1.el9.x86\_64

Seems weird. You should have `ansible` package installed, not only `ansible-core`, as you are listing community collections with `ansible-galaxy`, which would not be available with `ansible-core` alone AFAIK.

Perhaps you installed it with pip instead, so assuming you don’t use a venv, you could check by running: `pip list installed | grep -i ansible` (even though `ansible --version` shows binary to be located in /usr/bin, so I highly doubt it). `which ansible` and `update-alternatives --list ansible` might also hint us.

Also note collections paths could be defined in an ansible.cfg config file, which could point to other locations depending on where you ran your commands from.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Adam839](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/ansible/user_avatar/forum.ansible.com/adam839/32/1782_2.png) [@Adam839](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Adam839)\
**Post date:** [December 13, 2023, 11:59pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-windows-vs-community-windows-and-how-to-remove-a-collection/2888/3 "2023-12-13T23:59:25Z")

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[ansible@ode-ansible02 ~]$ ansible-config dump | grep COLLECTIONS\_PATHS  
COLLECTIONS\_PATHS(default) = [‘/home/ansible/.ansible/collections’, ‘/usr/share/ansible/collections’]

[ansible@ode-ansible02 ~]$ ls /home/ansible/.ansible/collections/ansible\_collections/  
ansible ansible.windows-2.1.0.info  
ansible.posix-1.5.4.info ansible.windows-2.2.0.info  
ansible.windows-1.12.0.info community  
ansible.windows-1.14.0.info community.general-7.2.1.info  
ansible.windows-2.0.0.info

[ansible@ode-ansible02 ~]$ pip list installed  
Package Version

* * *

ansible-core 2.14.9  
Babel 2.9.1  
certifi 2022.6.15  
cffi 1.14.5  
charset-normalizer 2.1.1  
cryptography 36.0.1  
dbus-python 1.2.18  
gpg 1.15.1  
idna 3.3  
Jinja2 2.11.3  
libcomps 0.1.18  
MarkupSafe 1.1.1  
nftables 0.1  
ntlm-auth 1.5.0  
packaging 20.9  
pip 21.2.3  
ply 3.11  
pycparser 2.20  
PyGObject 3.40.1  
pyparsing 2.4.7  
python-dateutil 2.8.1  
pytz 2021.1  
pywinrm 0.4.3  
PyYAML 5.4.1  
requests 2.28.1  
requests-ntlm 1.1.0  
resolvelib 0.5.4  
rpm 4.16.1.3  
selinux 3.5  
setuptools 53.0.0  
six 1.15.0  
systemd-python 234  
urllib3 1.26.12  
xmltodict 0.13.0

I was able to remove the community stuff using rm -Rf ~/.ansible/collections/ansible\_collections/community\* . I now only see ansible.posix and ansible.windows.

Still not clear to me community.windows vs ansible.windows. They both seem to have the same plugins just looking at them manually (before I removed community stuff). Anyone else know for sure how that works? Does ansible pull in community.windows into ansible.windows occasionally or vice versa?

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**Author:** ![felixfontein](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/ansible/user_avatar/forum.ansible.com/felixfontein/32/7530_2.png) [@felixfontein](https://forum.ansible.com/u/felixfontein)\
**Post date:** [December 14, 2023, 6:16am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-windows-vs-community-windows-and-how-to-remove-a-collection/2888/4 "2023-12-14T06:16:17Z")

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> [@Adam839](#):
>
> Still not clear to me community.windows vs ansible.windows. They both seem to have the same plugins just looking at them manually (before I removed community stuff).

Take a look at the documentation:

- [Community.Windows — Ansible Documentation](https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/windows/#plugin-index)
- [Ansible.Windows — Ansible Documentation](https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/ansible/windows/#plugin-index)

As you can see they have quite a different set of modules and plugins. Also community.windows has ansible.windows listed as a dependency ([https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.windows/blob/main/galaxy.yml#L14](https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.windows/blob/main/galaxy.yml#L14)), so if you install community.windows, `ansible-galaxy collection install` will also make sure that ansible.windows is present (but not the other way around).

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Adam839](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/ansible/user_avatar/forum.ansible.com/adam839/32/1782_2.png) [@Adam839](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Adam839)\
**Post date:** [December 14, 2023, 12:14pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-windows-vs-community-windows-and-how-to-remove-a-collection/2888/5 "2023-12-14T12:14:58Z")

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Thanks. I must have been looking at the wrong list of plugins in community. They are different. I at first thought win\_updates was in both community.windows and ansible.windows.

Thanks for clearing that up for me.