How to create a package module like the YUM one

Archives Ansible Developer
1

Hi there,

I posted this to the Ansible Project list but got no responses, perhaps this is the better forum for it to be answered though, so I’m cross posting it here to.

I’m trying to create an ansible module to install packages using a custom package management system. I want it to function like the core yum module says it does when used in a loop, i.e. “Instead of calling the module with a single package each time through the loop, ansible calls the module once with all of the package names from the loop”

How would I replicate this in my own module?

I couldn’t see anything special in the source for the yum module that would enable this behaviour.

I tried just specifying the input as type list, simplified below:

module = AnsibleModule( argument_spec = dict( name=dict(type="list", required=True), ), ) cmd = [ 'pkg_agent', '-X', ','.join(module.params'name']) ] rc, out, err = module.run_command(cmd)

But when I used my module in a playbook, it didn’t work as desired:

`
tasks:

  • name: “Install packages”
    pkg_install:
    name: “{{ item }}”
    become: True
    with_items:
  • ‘common-tests’
  • ‘ops-libs’
    `

Both the debug output and the resulting behaviour was it running the install on each package individually, and not bundling them together.

The expected result was that it would run pkg_agent -X common-tests,ops-libs but what in fact happened is it ran pkg_agent -X common-tests and then pkg_agent -X ops-libs

This was using Ansible 2.2 on Ubuntu

Any help in where I’ve gone wrong with this would be much appreciated.

  • Peter
2

Hi Peter, you’ll need to add your module name to the squash_actions ansible.cfg setting. The default value of that is “apk, apt, dnf, homebrew, pacman, pkgng, yum, zypper”, so just append your module to the list.