Can a developed Ansible module include or extend an Ansible Core module?

Question

I am developing an Ansible module that generates a url, fetches (like get_url) the tarball at that url from my internal artifactory and then extracts it. I am wondering if there is a way to include or extend the get_url Ansible core module in my module. I can't have this in multiple steps because the url being used is generated from a git hash and requires a multi-step search.

If there isn't a way, I will probably just copy the whole get_url module and use it in my module, but I would like to avoid that.

I'd like to do something like:

module_json_response = module.get_module('get_url').issue_command('url=http://myartifactory.com/my_artifact.tar.gz dest=/path/to/local/my_artifact.tar.gz');

My understanding of Ansible is that it uploads the module in use and executes it, including another module isn't supported or isn't documented.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

To quote Michael DeHaan's post here:

Generally speaking, Ansible allows sharing code through "lib/ansible/module_common.py" to make writing functionality easier.

It does not, however, make it possible for one module to call another, which has not, to date, really been needed -- that's not entirely true, we used to have something like this for file and copy until we got smart and moved the file attribute code into common :)

It seems like since url access is frequent enough we could make a common function in module common for url downloads -- IF we modify the get_url code to also use it so we aren't repeating ourselves.

He later followed up with:

You can access the way template works by writing an action plugin, but it's more involved than writing a simple client module.

+1 to moving get_url code into common, that's come up a few times.