Finding included plugins

As we discussed in the preceding section, plugins are not as apparent in Ansible as their module counterparts are, and yet we have been using them behind the scenes in every single Ansible command we’ve issued so far! Let’s build on our work in the previous section, where we looked at the plugin documentation, by looking at where we can find the source code for the plugins. This, in turn, will serve as a precursor to us building a simple plugin of our own.

If you installed Ansible on a Linux system using a package manager (that is, via an RPM or DEB package), then the location of your plugins will depend on your OS. For example, on my test CentOS 8 system where I installed Ansible from the official RPM package, I can see the plugins installed here:

$ ls /usr/lib/python3.11/site-packages/ansible/plugins/
action cliconf httpapi inventory lookup terminal
become connection __init__.py loader.py netconf test
cache doc_fragments __init__.pyc loader...