Accessing module documentation from the command line
As discussed in the preceding section, the Ansible project prides itself on its documentation, and making this documentation readily accessible is an important part of the project itself. Now, suppose you are working on an Ansible task (in a playbook, role, or even an ad hoc command) and you are in a data center environment where you only have access to the shell of the machine you are working on. How would you get access to the Ansible documentation?
Fortunately, part of the Ansible installation that we have not discussed yet is the ansible-doc
tool, which is installed as standard along with the familiar ansible
and ansible-playbook
executables. The ansible-doc
command includes a complete (text-based) library of documentation for all the modules that ship with the version of Ansible you have installed. This means that the very information you need to work with modules is at your fingertips, even if you are in the middle of a...