With Ansible you're expected to share roles with the Ansible Galaxy tool (either through the Ansible Galaxy hub or just using straight git repositories). This works well enough (and personally I am using ansible-galaxy init to start each new role, even those that I'm not going to share with the community). However, for sharing modules there is no such easy solution, or is it?
Sharing with git submodule
I'd like to start by saying that git submodule is the poor man's package manager and it's lack of popularity is (somewhat) justified. However, this is a nice demonstration of a case where there is no package manager available and of using git submodule instead. Also, I've only been able to use this technique for modules written in Python, which is nice considering the lack of boiler-plate that Ansible provides and that Python is my personal preference.
The whole story is really quite simple, create a separate git repository with the modules in it. You can put them in sub-directories and as a far as I know, there's no restriction on the hierarchy depth. In your playbook directory create a library directory (the Ansible default, so you can change this in ansible.cfg) and create an empty __init__.py file inside that directory. Add a git submodule inside that directory and you're done. Let's see an example
git init ansible-modules cd ansible-modules # Write great module git commit -a git push cd /path/to/your/ansible/playbook/repository mkdir library touch library/__init__.py git submodule add host:/path/to/ansible-modules library/my_modules git add .gitmodules git commit git push
Really, not that complicated. The only magic (undocumented) bit is creating a __init__.py file inside the library directory, which is a shame that the Ansible documentation doesn't cover that. If you want to see a real-life example, checkout my ansible-playbooks and ansible-modules git repos.