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Ansible Galaxy Tutorial: Leveraging Community Roles for Faster Automation

Picture of Shibi Vasudevan By  Shibi Vasudevan  ·  8 minute read

In network automation, you want things to be efficient, right? Managing tons of devices from different vendors takes effective tools, and let's be honest, writing Ansible playbooks from scratch for every single task is a major time drain. That's where Ansible Galaxy comes in, a central place for ready-made automation content from the community and vendors, built to make your job easier and faster.

If you already know the basics of Ansible playbooks, checking out Galaxy is the next logical step to really speed up your network automation. This guide will walk you through what Galaxy gives you, how to use its roles and collections, and how CloudMyLab fits into your practice.

What is Ansible Galaxy?

Ansible Galaxy serves as a central repository for Ansible content. It contains:

  • Ansible Roles: Pre-packaged automation for specific tasks or configurations (like setting up NTP or handling VLANs).
  • Ansible Collections: Introduced in Ansible 2.9+, these are bigger bundles. They can hold multiple roles, modules (the actual code that does things), plugins (that add features to Ansible), and documentation.

This stuff is built and kept up-to-date by the community – individual engineers, the core Ansible team at Red Hat, and network vendors like Cisco, Juniper, and Arista. For network engineers like you, Galaxy is a library of proven automation you can reuse instead of building common tasks from zero.

Why Use Ansible Galaxy?

You've probably run a show run playbook before—but what if you need to automate complex tasks like:

  • Backing up Cisco configs
  • Upgrading IOS images
  • Deploying standard SNMP or NTP configs across hundreds of routers

Writing these from scratch can be tedious. Instead, you can reuse roles and collections from Galaxy that others (including Cisco!) have already tested and published.

Read more: Depending on your environment’s size, you can run these tasks using the Ansible CLI for simplicity or the Ansible Automation Platform for enterprise-scale management. Learn the differences in this Ansible CLI vs. Automation Platform comparison.

What is an Ansible Galaxy Role?

A role is a neatly packaged set of automation tasks, structured for reusability. It includes:

  • Tasks (in tasks/main.yml) showing the automation steps.
  • Variable definitions (in defaults/main.yml for defaults and vars/main.yml for role-specific variables).
  • Templates (in the templates/ directory) using Jinja2 to generate configuration files.
  • Handlers (in handlers/main.yml) that run when notified, often for things like restarting services.
  • Static files (in the files/ directory) to be copied to devices.
  • Metadata (in meta/main.yml) about the role, who made it, and if it needs other roles.

Roles make things modular, keeping your playbooks cleaner and easier to handle by putting complex bits into reusable packages.

Ansible Galaxy Role Example: Real-time

You want to configure NTP on 500 Cisco routers. You can use a role like:

ansible-galaxy install network-ntp

Then in your playbook:

- hosts: cisco_routers
roles:
  - cisco_ios_vlan

Note: cisco_ios_vlan is a sample name

What is an Ansible Galaxy Collection?

Ansible Collections are the newer, standard way to package Ansible content (started with Ansible 2.9). They're bigger than roles – a single collection can have multiple roles, custom modules (like vendor-specific ones for device APIs), plugins (for things like inventory or connections), and docs.

Collections use a <namespace>.<collection_name> format (like cisco.ios or junipernetworks.junos). This helps avoid naming clashes and tells you who made or maintains the content. Collections make it easier to share full, integrated automation solutions from vendors and the community.

Example:

ansible-galaxy collection install cisco.ios

Installing cisco.ios gets you modules like cisco.ios.ios_config, cisco.ios.ios_command, cisco.ios.ios_facts, plus any roles or plugins included in that collection.

Read more: To ensure these collections run consistently across different systems, use Ansible Execution Environments, which package dependencies into containers. Explore Understanding Ansible Execution Environments for setup and benefits.

Why Roles and Collections Matter to Network Engineers

Roles are tactical, collections are strategic. Together, they let you automate everything from one-off tweaks to enterprise-wide deployments while following community best practices.

Using them effectively helps you out in several ways:

  • Save a ton of time: Use automation that's already built and tested instead of writing everything from scratch.
  • Help standardize things: Implement configs the same way every time, using community or vendor best practices.
  • Speed up your learning: Look at the code in well-built community and vendor contributions to see how others do it.
  • Make teamwork easier: Share standard automation units within your team or contribute back to the wider community.
  • Scale your automation faster: Apply automation to many devices confidently using reliable, pre-built pieces.

What are Galaxy Namespaces?

A namespace in Ansible Galaxy is a unique name (usually for an organization, vendor, or person) that groups related content, specifically collections.

Examples of Popular Namespaces:

  • cisco, arista, junipernetworks (or juniper): Vendor-specific content.
  • ansible: Content from the core Ansible team (like ansible.netcommon).
  • community: Content maintained by the wider community (like community.general).
ansible-galaxy collection list

How to Use Galaxy: Practical Steps

Read more: For an enhanced CLI experience when managing Galaxy content, try Ansible Navigator, a tool for running and debugging Ansible tasks. Learn more in our Ansible Navigator guide.

Install a Role in Galaxy

Install a single role (using a namespace is best practice now):

ansible-galaxy install .

Roles usually land in ~/.ansible/roles. You can check or change this path in your ansible.cfg file using the roles_path setting:

[defaults]
roles_path = ~/.ansible/roles:/etc/ansible/roles:/opt/custom_roles

To see what roles are installed on your system:

ansible-galaxy role list

Install a Collection in Galaxy

As described earlier, you may install collections using ansible-galaxy collection install:

ansible-galaxy collection install cisco.ios

You can grab a collection archive (.tar.gz) without installing it right away, which is handy for offline setups:

ansible-galaxy collection download cisco.ios

Then, install the downloaded file later:

ansible-galaxy collection install cisco.ios-*.tar.gz

To list installed collections (and see their versions and where they are):

ansible-galaxy collection list

Collections usually go into ~/.ansible/collections/ansible_collections/<namespace>/<collection_name> or in a project's collections/ directory if you use a requirements.yml file.

To remove a collection:

ansible-galaxy collection remove cisco.ios

Install Multiple Dependencies (Recommended for Projects):

collections:
- name: cisco.ios
roles:
- name:

Install everything listed in the file with one command:

ansible-galaxy collection install -r requirements.yml

This command handles installing both collections and roles from the file.

Read more: How you write and structure your Ansible playbooks totally impacts how well they scale. Read our article on the best practices for Ansible playbooks.

Real-World Example: Automating NTP Config

Let's set up NTP servers on devices in your cisco_routers inventory group using modules from the cisco.ios collection.

Playbook configure_ntp.yml:

---
- name: Configure NTP on Cisco routers
  hosts: cisco_routers
  gather_facts: false
  collections: # Tell Ansible which collections this playbook uses
    - cisco.ios

  tasks:
    - name: Set NTP server configuration
      cisco.ios.ios_config: # Use the Full Collection Name (FQCN) for the module
        lines:
          - ntp server 192.168.1.10
          - ntp server 192.168.1.11
        save_when: modified

This playbook uses the ios_config module to push NTP settings and saves the config if changes are made. Done in minutes, not hours.

Troubleshooting Galaxy: When Things Go Sideways

Stuff breaks. Here's how to tackle common Galaxy problems:

  • Role/Collection Fails on Some Devices:
    • Symptom: Works most places but fails on a specific model or OS version.
    • Fix: Check the docs on Galaxy or GitHub for supported platforms/versions. Use ansible-playbook playbook.yml --check first. Use -vvv to see detailed output for errors.
  • Deprecated Modules or Behavior Changes:
    • Symptom: A module gives warnings, or its behavior changes after updating a collection.
    • Fix: See what version you have. Check release notes/changelogs for changes. Pin your dependency to a specific version that works in your requirements.yml.
  • Duplicate Names:
    • Symptom: Ansible says you have duplicate roles/collections.
    • Fix: List your installed roles/collections to see the conflict. Use the full name (FQCN like namespace.collection_name.module_name) in playbooks to be specific. Remove the one you don't want.
  • Playbook Hangs or Times Out:
    • Symptom: A task just hangs or times out.
    • Fix: Just check if you can ping the device (ansible -m ansible.netcommon.ping). Check your inventory variables (ansible_user, ansible_password - seriously, use Ansible Vault for passwords!), ansible_network_os, ansible_connection. Increase task or global command timeouts in ansible.cfg. Check network latency.

Read more: To further boost performance, see Best Practices for Ansible Performance for tuning execution strategies like free or linear.

Uploading Your Own Role to Ansible Galaxy

Sharing your useful automation helps the community. Here's how:

Create Role in VS Code

ansible-galaxy init my_custom_role

Create a GitHub Repository - Name it like: ansible-role-my_custom_role

Push Role to GitHub - Push your role files to GitHub, including a meta/main.yml with basic info.

Create a Galaxy Account - Create an Ansible Galaxy account if you don't have one.

Link Your GitHub Account - Go to your Galaxy Settings → GitHub Integration, and then authorize access to your GitHub repositories.

Import Your Role - Import your role from GitHub via "My Content" -> "Add Content". Your role becomes available on Galaxy. It'll be listed under your namespace like

my_namespace.my_custom_role

To Install Your Role - Others can install it using:

ansible-galaxy install my_namespace.my_custom_role

Why Choose Galaxy Over Alternatives?

While custom Python scripts (using libraries like Netmiko or NAPALM) offer detailed control, and vendor-specific tools (like Cisco DNA Center, Arista CloudVision) provide integrated experiences within their ecosystems, Ansible Galaxy offers advantages for scalable and standardized multi-vendor automation:

Galaxy content is often designed and tested for large environments, enabling consistent management of many devices. This scale is hard to achieve reliably with custom scripts without significant engineering. Using community or vendor content encourages using established automation patterns, making your work more maintainable. Galaxy benefits from the collective knowledge of thousands of engineers and direct vendor contributions, providing access to ongoing maintenance and support through collection maintainers. It excels in multi-vendor environments. A single Ansible control node with collections like cisco.ios and junipernetworks.junos can orchestrate changes across a heterogeneous network within one workflow, which is difficult with separate vendor tools.

While Python scripting offers flexibility and vendor tools deep integration, Ansible Galaxy provides a balance with reusable, standardized, community-supported content ideal for scaling network automation across diverse environments efficiently.

Automate Like a Pro with Galaxy and CloudMyLab

Network automation is vital for managing modern networks. Ansible Galaxy provides a critical resource, offering thousands of pre-built roles and collections (like cisco.ios, junipernetworks.junos, arista.eos) that save you time and effort. By using this content, you can automate complex tasks like configuration backups, software upgrades, and compliance checks consistently and at scale.

Pairing Ansible Galaxy with CloudMyLab's dedicated automation lab environments creates a combination for practicing. CloudMyLab offers a safe, realistic sandbox to experiment with new Galaxy content without risking production networks. You can test playbooks using vendor collections against virtual devices from various manufacturers and hone your skills in controlled POCs before deployment.

Explore Ansible Galaxy, find roles and collections relevant to your network, and use ansible-galaxy install to add them to your toolkit. Then, leverage CloudMyLab's hosted lab environments to practice, test, and perfect your automation workflows.

💡 Why risk breaking production with untested automation? Use CloudMyLab's sandbox environments to test with confidence.

Check out our Ansible Network Automation offerings or start a free trial.

Learning Resources

FAQ

What is Ansible Galaxy?

It's a website and command-line tool (ansible-galaxy) for finding, sharing, and managing reusable Ansible content, primarily roles and collections.

What's the difference between a role and a collection?

A role is a standardized way to structure automation for a specific task or component. A collection is a broader package that can contain multiple roles, modules, plugins, and documentation, often used to distribute content from a specific vendor or community. Collections are the newer standard.

Where are Roles and Collections Stored?

The roles usually go into ~/.ansible/roles/. Check or change the path in ansible.cfg using roles_path.
The collections typically land in ~/.ansible/collections/ansible_collections/. Use ansible-galaxy collection list to confirm the exact paths on your system.

How do I install content from Galaxy?

Use the ansible-galaxy install command for roles (ansible-galaxy install <namespace>.<role_name>) or collections (ansible-galaxy collection install <namespace>.<collection_name>). You can also install multiple dependencies using a requirements.yml file (ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml).

Do I need internet access to use Galaxy content?

You need internet access to install content from https://galaxy.ansible.com/ . Once installed, you can use the content locally. For air-gapped environments, you can download collection archives first and install them offline.

Can I use Galaxy content for network devices from different vendors?

Yes, many collections are vendor-specific (like cisco.ios, junipernetworks.junos, arista.eos), allowing you to use modules and roles tailored for those devices. Other collections like ansible.netcommon provide modules that work across multiple vendors.

How do I contribute my own automation to Galaxy?

You need to structure your automation as a role or collection, store it in a public GitHub repository, and then import it into your Ansible Galaxy account.
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