How many modules do you need?

How many modules do you need?

Ansible Collections are coming. A big change in Ansible, so a stable version will likely be a good moment to go to Ansible 3. Listening to the developers, I think we can expect Ansible 3 in the spring of 2020.

Anyway, let’s get some stats:

How many modules am I using?

That was not so difficult to estimate: 97 modules.

What ‘weird’ modules?

A bit more difficult to answer, I’ve taken two approaches:

1. Take the bottom of the list of “most used modules”.
2. Walked through the 97 modules and discover odd once.

• bigip_*: I’ve written a role for a workshop.
• gem: Don’t know, weird.
• debug: What, get it out of there!
• include_vars: Why would that be?
• fail: Let’s check that later.
• set_fact: I’m now a big fan of set_fact, most facts can be “rendered” in vars/main.yml.

How many ‘vendor’ modules?

I expect some Ansible Collections will be maintained by the vendors; Google (GCP), Microsoft (Azure), F5 (BigIP), yum (RedHat), etc. That’s why knowing this upfront is likely smart.

Module	Times used	Potential maintainer
pip	17	PyPi
apt	16	Canonical
yum	9	Red Hat
apt_key	6	Canonical
apt_repository	5	Canonical
rpm_key	4	Red Hat
zypper	3	SUSE
yum_repository	3	Red Hat
dnf	3	Red Hat/Fedora
zypper_repository	2	SUSE
zabbix_host	2	Zabbix
zabbix_group	2	Zabbix
apk	2	Alpine
tower_*	7 (combined)	RedHat
redhat_subscription	1	RedHat
pacman	1	ArchLinux
bigip_*	6 (combined)	F5

How often do I use what modules?

Place	Module	Times used
1	package	138
2	service	137
3	command	73
4	template	64
5	file	62
6	meta	27
7	assert	26
8	unarchive	24
9	lineinfile	21
10	copy	20

Wow, I’m especially surprised by two modules:

1. command - I’m going to review if there are modules that I can use instead of command. I know very well that command should be used as a last resort, not 73 times… Painful.
2. assert - Most roles used to see of variable met the criteria. (If a variable is defined and the type is correct.) Rather wait for role spec.