Ideas #

Ways to improve the book

• What if you want to use existing Ansible code in your extension?
• Is there a good way to combine multiple Ansible actions together into a single, reusable action?
• Some kind of coherent explanation about the fucking directory layout
• Add a section on external data stores
  • Answer the question “what should you do if you need to store data somewhere but the inventory isn’t a good place for it?”
  • If you’re doing this, you may want to write a lookup plugin (link) to retrieve that data
• Organize the book by types of problems to solve
  • I might have a “How does Ansible think about extensions?” section that describes the differences between plugins and modules or whatever
  • But the more important content is “here’s how to add an action” or “here’s how to get inventory information from an external source”, so those sections should come first
• Is it valuable to talk about custom facts and inventory scripts?
  • These are fairly well documented in the actual Ansible documentation
  • Maybe worth a little show and tell but not spending too much time
• Examples with Active Directory
  • Inventory from AD?
  • Host vars from AD?
  • Querying AD with a lookup plugin
• Show what you can write in languages other than Python
  • Non-Python programmers might appreciate knowing the bounds of what’s possible
  • Relatively ignored in the Ansible documentation
  • https://github.com/pmarkham/writing-ansible-modules-in-bash/blob/master/ansible_bash_modules.md
  • Huh. Some discussion of Powershell https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/dev_guide/developing_modules_general_windows.html
  • https://dmilind.github.io/Custom-Ansible-Module-In-Golang/
• Link to other examples of Ansible plugins
  • https://rndmh3ro.github.io/
• Learn more about, and add prose for, Ansible Galaxy.