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The top 100 Ansible modules

mike

Ansible is an automation system which is widely used for deployments and configuration. It contains a dizzying array of modules for interfacing with things like files, services, package managers, and various pieces of software and hardware.

Background

There are some modules which I would expect every Ansible user to be familiar with, while others are barely used at all. I could have a guess about which modules I use most, but what about the wider community?

I couldn’t find any existing data, so I set out to determine which Ansible modules were most widely-used. The best source for this is Ansible Galaxy, which is a directory of around 18,000 Ansible roles. Using some scripts, I sifted through the 18,259 publicly accessible roles from Ansible Galaxy, found 71,610 files to look through, and tallied up which modules were being used by each of the 317,757 tasks in those files.

The list

These are the top 100 modules as of January 2019. I used the same method to build such a list in January 2018, so you can also see the change in popularity of some modules over the last 12 months.

Rank Module Uses Rank +/-
1 file 26,224 +1
2 include 25,267 -1
3 template 24,062 –
4 command 23,952 –
5 service 19,436 –
6 shell 19,401 –
7 set_fact 17,079 +1
8 apt 16,006 +1
9 lineinfile 12,432 -2
10 copy 8,794 +1
11 yum 8,733 -1
12 assert 7,504 +7
13 include_tasks 6,686 +15
14 stat 5,922 -2
15 package 5,422 -1
16 get_url 5,323 -3
17 debug 5,147 -2
18 import_tasks 5,016 +20
19 include_vars 4,251 -2
20 apt_repository 3,789 -4
21 user 3,233 -3
22 fail 2,812 +2
23 unarchive 2,734 -2
24 apt_key 2,665 -4
25 pip 2,474 –
26 systemd 2,389 +8
27 action 2,114 -4
28 git 2,043 -1
29 uri 1,680 +7
30 group 1,665 -1
31 sysctl 1,331 -5
32 raw 1,323 -2
33 mysql_user 1,266 –
34 meta 1,204 +3
35 replace 1,125 -3
36 ini_file 1,125 -5
37 find 1,030 -15
38 local_action 986 -3
39 mysql_db 959 –
40 cron 925 –
41 wait_for 898 –
42 rpm_key 771 –
43 include_role 742 +15
44 yum_repository 723 +2
45 mount 669 -2
46 blockinfile 619 +3
47 firewalld 579 +1
48 ufw 563 -1
49 authorized_key 557 -4
50 docker_container 488 +2
51 dnf 455 +5
52 seboolean 417 -8
53 homebrew 409 -2
54 fetch 378 +1
55 npm 367 -5
56 osx_defaults 363 +8
57 postgresql_user 350 -4
58 pkgng 345 -4
59 pause 340 +4
60 script 314 +5
61 setup 290 +7
62 postgresql_db 289 -2
63 mysql_replication 286 -1
64 win_regedit 281 +6
65 pacman 257 -4
66 debconf 256 +1
67 slurp 255 +10
68 gem 253 -11
69 iptables 240 +13
70 apache2_module 231 -4
71 synchronize 213 -2
72 docker 213 -13
73 alternatives 210 –
74 selinux 202 –
75 oc_obj 199 +98
76 make 194 -1
77 win_shell 191 +13
78 modprobe 187 +11
79 hostname 181 -7
80 zypper 174 -4
81 xml 160 –
82 supervisorctl 160 -11
83 win_file 149 +15
84 homebrew_cask 149 -6
85 add_host 144 -2
86 rabbitmq_user 129 -7
87 pamd 124 +81
88 win_command 116 +13
89 assemble 116 -9
90 htpasswd 115 -6
91 apk 112 -5
92 openbsd_pkg 111 -7
93 win_get_url 109 +14
94 win_chocolatey 109 –
95 docker_image 109 +4
96 tempfile 106 +25
97 locale_gen 105 -5
98 easy_install 97 -10
99 django_manage 97 -3
100 composer 96 -3

Out of over 2,500 modules mentioned in Ansible Galaxy, it turns out that only a few dozen are widely used. Following this, there is a long tail of infrequently-used and custom modules.

How many modules do I need to know?

You can write 80% of the roles in Ansible Galaxy using only the 74 most popular Ansible modules.

For writing an individual Ansible role, you don’t need anywhere near this many. The median number of modules used by an role in Ansible Galaxy is just 6.

There are a few reasons that you won’t need to use many popular modules all at the same time:

Some notes

Here are some things to keep in mind when reading the table.

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