How to check if Ansible collection is installed or not

What is Ansible?

Ansible is an open-source automation platform that can be used to automate the process of deploying, configuring, and managing software applications, servers, and infrastructure. Ansible provides a simple, yet powerful, automation language that allows you to describe the desired state of your infrastructure and applications, and then automate the process of achieving that state.

Ansible uses a simple syntax called YAML (Yet Another Markup Language) to describe the tasks that it should perform. These tasks can be organized into playbooks, which are collections of tasks that can be run in a specific order to achieve a specific goal. Ansible also provides a number of built-in modules that can be used to perform common tasks, such as installing software, managing files and directories, and managing system users and groups.

One of the key benefits of Ansible is that it uses a push-based architecture, which means that it pushes the configuration and management instructions from a central control node to the managed nodes, rather than requiring the managed nodes to pull instructions from the control node. This makes it easy to manage large numbers of nodes from a single control node, and it also means that managed nodes do not need to have any special software installed in order to be managed by Ansible.

Ansible is widely used in a variety of environments, including data centers, cloud environments, and web-scale environments. It is a popular choice for configuration management, deployment, and orchestration tasks, and it is used by many organizations to automate the process of managing their infrastructure and applications.

Check if Ansible collection is installed or not

Use the Ansible Galaxy Command

To check if an Ansible collection is installed, you can use the ansible-galaxy command-line tool.

Here’s an example of how to check if a collection called my_collection is installed:

ansible-galaxy collection list | grep my_collection

This will list all of the collections that are installed on your system, and then grep will filter the list to show only the collection with the name my_collection.

If the collection is installed, the output will show the name and version of the collection. If the collection is not installed, the output will be blank.

Alternatively, you can use the ansible-galaxy command to search for a specific collection by name:

ansible-galaxy collection search my_collection

This will search for collections with the name my_collection and show the results in a list. If the collection is installed, it will be marked with a [i] to indicate that it is installed. If the collection is not installed, it will be marked with a [ ] to indicate that it is not installed.

You can also check the ansible.cfg file in your project directory to see if the collection is specified in the collections_paths setting. This setting specifies the paths where Ansible will search for collections. If the collection is installed in one of the specified paths, it will be used by Ansible when running playbooks.

Conclusion

In summary, there are two ways to check if an Ansible collection is installed:

• Using the Ansible Galaxy command.

• Trying to use the collection in a playbook.

Either method can be used to check if a collection has been installed.