Ansible 2.0 no longer finds modules in library subdirectories

[mrgnr]

ISSUE TYPE

• Bug Report

ANSIBLE VERSION

ansible 2.0.1.0
  config file =
  configured module search path = Default w/o overrides

CONFIGURATION

N/A

OS / ENVIRONMENT

N/A

SUMMARY

I'm upgrading from 1.9.1 to 2.0.1 and Ansible can no longer find modules contained in subdirectories of the library directory. Only modules at the top level of library are found. With Ansible <2.0, modules could be placed in subdirectories. This makes it difficult to use git submodules to add third-party modules to the library.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE

1. Create directories library/my_module/ alongside a playbook
2. Create a custom module called my_module and place it in library/my_module
3. Call my_module from a playbook
4. Run ansible-playbook

EXPECTED RESULTS

ansible-playbook should find the custom module when run.

ACTUAL RESULTS

ansible-playbook fails with the error ERROR! no action detected in task. This often indicates a misspelled module name, or incorrect module path.

[arikgam]

I think this happens to me as well, when using the yumrepo module.
My ansible is on tag v2.0.1.0-1 (bb6cade)

The weird thing is - it works fine on my workstation (Fedora 23, Python 2.7.11-3.fc23, Bash 4.3.42) but fails with this error on our server (CentOS 7, Python 2.7.5-34.el7, Bash 4.2.46).

[bcoca]

afaik its only been supported to have modules/plugins in custom library/ or <plugin_name>_plugins/ dir and not subdirs.

[mrgnr]

@bcoca The use case here is to pull in third-party modules as git submodules by linking to them in the library/ directory. I imagine this is a fairly common use case, and it worked fine in v1.9.

[relaxdiego]

Ansible docs also state that this subdirectory is auto-loaded: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/playbooks_best_practices.html#bundling-ansible-modules-with-playbooks

[bcoca]

that only points to ./library not sub directories of it.

[dazwin]

+1 Whether this was in documentation or not, it was very useful behavior in 1.9. Per @mrgnr, I have also being using git submodules and it worked well - several modules can be installed to the local ansible directory structure and they 'just worked'.

With the current behavior, getting custom modules integrated into an ansible structure becomes a PITA as all custom modules would now have to exist in a single directory (./library). Presumably we'd need to clone the module into a separate directory and run some kind of installation script to copy over the module's source file.

[dazwin]

@bcoca - is there any additional information you need to keep this issue alive? Will you accept a PR?

[jctanner]

!needs_info

[jctanner]

I've added this to our core team meeting agenda to get a group decision.

[abadger]

As a workaround, ANSIBLE_LIBRARY can take multiple paths (colon separated just like the PATH environment variable) so you can set each subdirectory as a path as well. I know this still requires two steps but it should be a little easier than moving the module out of the subdirectory to the toplevel ANSIBLE_LIBRARY every time it is updated.

[itdependsnetworks]

Thought you might want to see the meeting minutes:
https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/ansible-meeting/2017-01-03/public_core_meeting.2017-01-03-19.00.log.html#l-104

@mrgnr @relaxdiego @arikgam @dazwin @praymann @busrakoken @jseadragon @herbygillot @dschott

[abadger]

Documentation for using the library configuration var to address this use case is in the following PR: #20913

[abadger]

PR with documentation has been merged to devel. Closing this ticket.