Creating a package module like the yum module

[Peter Burns]

Hi there,

I'm trying to create an ansible module to install packages using a custom package management system. I want it to function like the core yum module says it does when used in a loop, i.e. "Instead of calling the module with a single package each time through the loop, ansible calls the module once with all of the package names from the loop"

How would I replicate this in my own module?

I couldn't see anything special in the source for the yum module that would enable this behaviour.

I tried just specifying the input as type list, simplified below:

module = AnsibleModule(

    argument_spec = dict(

        name=dict(type="list", required=True),

    ),

    supports_check_mode = True

)
cmd = [ 'pkg_agent', '-X', ','.join(module.params'name']) ]
rc, out, err = module.run_command(cmd)

But when I used my module in a playbook, it didn't work:

  tasks:

    - name: "Install packages"

      pkg_install:

        name: "{{ item }}"

      become: True

      with_items:

        - 'common-tests'

        - 'ops-libs'

Both the debug output and the resulting behaviour was it running the install on each package individually, and not bundling them together.

The expected result was that it would run `pkg_agent -X common-tests,ops-libs` but what in fact happened is it ran `pkg_agent -X common-tests` and then `pkg_agent -X ops-libs`

This was using Ansible 2.2 on Ubuntu

Any help in where I've gone wrong with this would be much appreciated.

- Peter