Ansible is a very rich framework with many flavors and usage patterns. While it can be applied in different ways, the technology is built on several pillars that should guide its use. Among these, one is particularly important for complex organizations: the Ansible Collection.
Collections provide a foundational element for Ansible code management, enabling separation of concerns, controlled distribution, and versioning. This makes them essential for scaling practices, maintaining consistency, and ensuring traceability across teams and environments.
Ansible Collections are a distribution format for Ansible content, including roles, modules, plugins, test code, and documentation. They make it easy to package, share, and reuse automation across projects and teams.
This introduction shows how to create collections, maintain them in local directories or private GitHub repositories, and use them in playbooks.
As most major Ansible Collections are public and distributed via Ansible Galaxy servers—which is often a problem in enterprise environments—this guide demonstrates how to install them from local sources e.g. local directories or repositories. This approach avoids reliance on public sources and ensures full control over external dependencies.
The material takes you from a classic playbook, through an Ansible Role, and finally to an Ansible Collection, concluding with the interface specification for Ansible Roles. The next step in the learning path will cover testing and Ansible fact persistence.
This document is supported by code available at the https://github.com/rstyczynski/ansible-collection-howto repository. The apache* playbooks take you through the steps towards building an Ansible Collection and using Molecule for testing. The duck* set is a recap that includes argument specification, and the state* set of plays introduces fact persistence.