Ansible ansible.builtin vs ansible.legacy: Collection Namespaces Explained — Video Tutorial

What is the "ansible.builtin" Ansible collection? What is the "ansible.legacy" collection? Today we're going to talk about Ansible's most essential modules and plugins and how we can use them in our everyday Playbook. I'm Luca Berton, Ansible Automation Expert, and welcome to today's lesson. What is ansible.builtin collection? The "ansible.builtin" collection refers to modules & plugins shipped with ansible-core. Technically is a synthetic collection, virtually constructed by the core engine. What is ansible.legacy collection? The "ansible.legacy" collection is a superset of "ansible.builtin" with 'custom' plugins in the configured paths and adjacent directories. We use the "ansible.legacy" when we don't specify any Ansible collection in our playbook. Technically is a synthetic collection, virtually constructed by the core engine. Links - https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/reference_appendices/faq.html#what-is-the-difference-between-ansible-legacy-and-ansible-builtin-collections - https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/reference_appendices/config.html#default-action-plugin-path Demo Live Playbook about "ansible.builtin" vs. "ansible.legacy" collections. Let's jump in a quick Playbook to demonstrate the difference between the "ansible.builtin" vs. "ansible.legacy" collections. I'm going to create a custom "debug" module that prints the extra text "foo" when used with the "msg" parameter. Let's see the different results when we execute with "ansible.builtin", "ansible.legacy" or without specifying any collections. The code is the following. common code - inventory (localhost) ```ini localhost ansible_connection=local ``` - ansible.cfg ```ini [defaults] action_plugins = plugins/action ``` - plugins/action/debug.py ```python Copyright 2012, Dag Wieers Copyright 2016, Toshio Kuratomi This file is part of Ansible Ansible is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. Ansible is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Ansible. If not, see . from __future__ import (absolute_import, division, print_function) __metaclass__ = type from ansible.errors import AnsibleUndefinedVariable from ansible.module_utils.six import string_types from ansible.module_utils._text import to_text from ansible.plugins.action import ActionBase class ActionModule(ActionBase): ''' Print statements during execution ''' TRANSFERS_FILES = False _VALID_ARGS = frozenset(('msg', 'var', 'verbosity')) def run(self, tmp=None, task_vars=None): if