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- In this video, we are
going to take a deep dive

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into collections and further understand.

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So, we have talked
about collections before

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and you know about the basic
usage of the collections.

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Now let's look a little bit further.

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So in the play header, you can
use the collections keyword

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and the collection keyword

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takes a list of collections
as its argument.

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And we have already discussed that

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that makes working with
collections a bit easier.

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And after using the collections keyword,

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the collection itself can
be addressed the old way.

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So you use selinux instead
of ansible.posix.selinux.

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We have already seen how this is happening

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in enforce-selinux-simplified,

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and we have also seen how
the old notation was used

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in the other example.

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Now let's try to understand

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the differences in the
usage between collections

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and the things that you can do with them,

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for Ansible 2.9 as well as 2.10.

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So in Ansible 2.9,

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collections are not a
default part of Ansible.

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You can use them,

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but if you want to use them,

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they must be installed.

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If you don't install
them, they're not there.

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So, they're not working.

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And if you're installing
multiple collections,

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you should consider using
a requirements file.

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A requirements file

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allows you to list all of the collections

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so that you can install them

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before actually starting to use them.

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In order to do so,

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use ansible-galaxy collection
install -r requirements.yml.

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I have an example.

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Let's check out the example
on an Ansible 2.9 system.

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In this video,

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it's really important that
with everything we do,

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you are fully conscient

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on the version of Ansible
on which we are doing it.

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So Ansible 2.9, the requirements file.

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In Ansible 2.10 and later,

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collections are installed by default.

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So that makes it a lot easier.

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Now, the next thing you wanna do

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if you're working with collections,

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you want to be able to get
collection information.

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Ansible 2.10 and later

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contain better collection integration

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and you can easily find collection
names using ansible-doc;

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ansible-doc-l | grep aws.

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And Ansible 2.9 only shows collections

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that have been installed.

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So collections themselves are not listed,

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just do your ansible-doc-l.

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And collection documentation is available

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while addressing collection
components directly.

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And finding collection names

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only goes through the installed files.

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That's not very convenient.

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Now, how can we list collection files?

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Well, you use ansible collection list

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on Ansible 2.10 and later,

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which will show a complete list

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of all the collections that are available.

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And to verify the contents
of the collection,

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you can access its physical location

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or investigate the directory structure.

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Now let's go check out how
this works in real life.

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Alright, let me demonstrate
how to work with collections.

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I'm on 2.9 for your information,

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and I'm using ansible-galaxy collection

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install

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ansible.posix

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Oh, that's not nice.

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This is probably a bug.

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Well, if it's a bug, then
we are not going to fix it.

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But fortunately, there's
the Ansible Galaxy website.

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Look, here is the posix collection.

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On the Ansible Galaxy website,

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there is an option to
download the tarball.

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So let's go behind the scenes

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and let me just download the tarball.

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Saving the file.

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And next, I can get back

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to my downloads directory

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There we can see the ansible-posix.

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So, I am going to do a tar -xvf.

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You know what, let me avoid
doing the Linux visitry

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and let me do an ls

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on

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.ansible.

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So we have collections.

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Just verifying the
contents in collections.

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We have ansible_collections

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and in there, there is nothing.

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So I'm going to use this
path that we just discovered.

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But this time I'm
copying the ansible-posix

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till the
.ansible/collections/ansible_collections.

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And I am going to make that
my current directory as well.

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So,
.ansible/collections/ansible_collections.

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There we go,

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and there I'm running tar xvf.

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So, what do we see?

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We see that it's creating

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the entire sub directory
structure in here.

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That's not exactly what I wanted.

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I wanted this sub directory
structure to be somewhere else.

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So, what does that mean?

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That means that I should
have created, mkdir ansible.

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A directory with the name, ansible

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and in this ansible, mkdir ansible/posix.

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And then I can move
everything to ansible/posix,

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and then I have my directory structure.

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So, in ansible/posix,

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we see the structure of
the posix collection,

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which is everything that
you can see right here.

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Wow, is that an easy way to
see what is in the collection?

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No, of course not.

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But it's probably the only way in 2.9.

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2.9 was never organized to
make it really accessible.

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Look, this is the best
way to get in there.

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In plugins,

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you will find all the different plugins,

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and modules happen to be plugins as well.

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Amongst these plugins,

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we have acl and at and
firewalld and whatever

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This is how you can figure out what it is.

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It brings it directly

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to the python scripts.

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Yes, I know.

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But it's probably the best
way that you can get around.

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Based on this information,

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based on the name of the collection,

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you can next use your ansible-doc command.

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So, if I'm using ansible-doc

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on ansible

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.posix

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.selinux,

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then, I am getting access

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to the actual collection information.

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And that is how it works on 2.9.

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Is that the best way around?

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No,

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but I really think that in Ansible 2.9

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you should consider
collections to be in preview,

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not in final.

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If you wanna use collections,

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make sure that you are
on Ansible 2.10 or later.