Ansible Collection API Documentation Extractor

This package contains code for Ansible collection documentation extractor. Its main audience are Ansible collection maintainers that would like to publish API docs in the HTML form without having to manually copy the data already present in the module's metadata.

Quickstart

Documentation extractor is published on PyPI and we can install it using pip:

$ pip install ansible-doc-extractor  # If we already have ansible installed
$ pip install ansible-doc-extractor[ansible]  # To also install ansible
$ pip install ansible-doc-extractor[base]  # To also install ansible-base
$ pip install ansible-doc-extractor[core]  # To also install ansible-core

If the previous command did not fail, we are ready to start extracting the documentation:

$ ansible-doc-extractor \
    /tmp/output-folder \
    ~/.ansible/collections/ansible_collections/my/col/plugins/modules/*.py

This will extract the documentation from modules in my.col collection and place resulting rst files into /tmp/output-folder.

Note

Always extract documentation from installed collection. Documentation fragment loader fails to combine various parts of the documentation otherwise.

Custom template

ansible-doc-extractor supports a custom Jinja2 template file via --template. The following variables are sent to the template:

Variable name	Type	Description	Module's documentation key
short_description	str	Short description of a module.	short_description
description	str / list	Longer description of a module, type depends on the module's description type.	description
requirements	list	Requirements needed on the host that executes this module.	requirements
options	dict	All module options, often called parameters or arguments.	options
notes	list	Module's additional notes.	notes
seealso	list	Details of any important information that doesn’t fit in one of the above sections.	seealso
deprecated	str	Marks modules that will be removed in future releases	deprecated
author	str / list	Author of the module, type can vary depending on how many authors module has.	author
metadata	dict	This section provides information about the module	Refers to ANSIBLE_METADATA block in the module.
examples	str	Code examples	Refers to EXAMPLES block in the module.
returndocs	dict	This section documents the information the module returns.	Refers to RETURN block in the module.

You can always refer to the default Jinja2 template.

Development setup

Getting development environment up and running is relatively simple:

$ python3 -m venv venv
$ . venv/bin/activate
(venv) $ pip install -e .

To test the extractor, we can run:

$ ansible-doc-extractor