Ansible-Doc

The ansible-doc tool is shipped with Ansible core, and contains Ansible documentation.

It allows you to reference ansible documentation without leaving the command line.

All modules that are currently installed/available will have their documentation in ansible-doc.

Module Documentation

You can use ansible-doc <builtin-module> to get the documentation for a specific module.

ansible-doc file

This will pull up the documentation for the ansible.builtin.file module.

---

If you have a custom module that you need to reference the docs for, you can specify the path to that module with the -M flag.

ansible-doc -M /path/to/module

Viewing Available Docs

You can use ansible-doc -l to view the modules that Ansible has documentation for.

ansible-doc -l

This output can be very long, so do a grep if you're looking for something specific.

For instance, to check for amazon modules:

ansible-doc | grep amazon

This will show you the modules for amazon.aws that you can use with ansible-doc.

E.g.:

ansible-doc amazon.aws.ec2

This shows you the documentation for the amazon.aws.ec2 module.

Module Snippets

Use ansible-doc -s to get a "snippet" of the documentation.

It shows a playbook snippet of how a task would look when using this module.

ansible-doc -s ansible.builtin.copy

Using builtin short names also works.

ansible-doc -s copy

This shows us what a task looks like, along with very descriptive comments as to what each argument is for.

- name: Copy files to remote locations
  copy:
    attributes:     # The attributes the resulting filesystem should have.  

These go into great detail about what the arguments do, and in what format they should be.