Contributing to collections

If you want to add functionality to an existing collection, modify a collection you are using to fix a bug, or change the behavior of a module in a collection, clone the Git repository for that collection and make changes on a branch. You can combine changes to a collection with a local checkout of Ansible (source hacking/env-setup). You should first check the collection repository to see if it has specific contribution guidelines. These are typically listed in the README.md or CONTRIBUTING.md files within the repository. See Creating your first collection pull request for more general guidelines and Testing Ansible and Collections for testing guidelines.

Contributing to a collection: community.general

These instructions apply to collections hosted in the ansible_collections GitHub organization. For other collections, especially for collections not hosted on GitHub, check the README.md of the collection for information on contributing to it.

This example uses the community.general collection. To contribute to other collections in the same GitHub org, replace the folder names community and general with the namespace and collection name of a different collection.

Prerequisites

Include ~/dev/ansible/collections/ in COLLECTIONS_PATHS
If that path mentions multiple directories, make sure that no other directory earlier in the search path contains a copy of community.general.

Creating a PR

Create the directory ~/dev/ansible/collections/ansible_collections/community:

mkdir -p ~/dev/ansible/collections/ansible_collections/community

Clone the community.general Git repository or a fork of it into the directory general:

cd ~/dev/ansible/collections/ansible_collections/community
git clone git@github.com:ansible-collections/community.general.git general

If you clone from a fork, add the original repository as a remote upstream:

cd ~/dev/ansible/collections/ansible_collections/community/general
git remote add upstream git@github.com:ansible-collections/community.general.git

Create a branch and commit your changes on the branch.
Remember to add tests for your changes, see Testing collections.
Push your changes to your fork of the collection and create a Pull Request.

You can test your changes by using this checkout of community.general in playbooks and roles with whichever version of Ansible you have installed locally, including a local checkout of ansible/ansible’s devel branch.