Managing automation content in Ansible becomes very chaotic as your infrastructure grows. Files are scattered across directories, there are inconsistent naming conventions, and it is difficult to share your work with team members or the wider community. Every time you onboard someone new, it takes them several days to learn your custom automation setup. When you need to reuse modules that you created six months ago, you spend hours browsing folders, trying to remember where you saved them. Working together with other teams is also difficult because it leads to copy-pasting, duplication, and having different versions. Ever wondered if there was something to overcome these challenges?

Ansible collections solve these problems by providing a standardized way to organize and distribute your automation content. Collections package related tasks, roles, modules, plugins, and playbooks into a single, shareable unit that anyone can easily install and use. In this blog, I’ll walk you through creating your own Ansible collection from scratch, exploring its structure, and showing you how to test, build, and publish it for maximum reusability.

Why use custom Ansible Collections?

Ansible collections are helpful when you need to extend the platform’s capabilities or when built-in modules and roles don’t fit your requirements.

Here are the top reasons to build your own Ansible collection:

• Customization: Tailor automation to fit your organization’s specific needs.

• Proprietary systems: Integrate with custom software or hardware that isn’t supported by Ansible out-of-the-box.

• Reusability: Encapsulate functionality in reusable modules and roles.

• Versioning: Easily manage versions and track changes in your automation code.

• Clean and modular: Organize automation tasks to make playbooks cleaner and more maintainable.

• Integration: Connect to external tools, services, or APIs not supported by existing Ansible modules.[node:summary]

Step-by-step guide to create an Ansible collection

Here’s the process of Ansible collection creation.

Step 1: Create a directory for your collection

You need to create a directory structure for your collection to get started. The ansible-galaxy command provides an easy way to set this up using the init feature.

ansible-galaxy collection init <namespace>.<collection_name>

​​​​Replace it with your username or organization name (e.g., Rtech) and your collection's name (e.g., RLT). This will generate the basic structure for your collection.

Example command:

ansible-galaxy collection init Rtech.RLT

This command creates a folder structure that looks like this:

Rtech/
└── RLT/
    ├── README.md
    ├── docs/
    ├── galaxy.yml
    ├── meta/
     │   └── runtime.yml
    ├── plugins/
    │   └── README.md
    └── roles/

Step 2: Add content to your collection

Now that you have the basic structure, you can start adding content like roles or modules.

a. Create your custom module:

To know more information click on the given below blog link:

https://www.opcito.com/blogs/ansible-collections-step-by-step-guide