When working with Ansible, and more specifically with Ansible Automation Platform (AAP), accessing the documentation for specific modules directly from the terminal can significantly speed up the process of creating efficient playbooks. In this post, I’ll walk you through how to search for examples in the documentation using the ansible-navigator doc command.

For this example, we’ll explore the community.general.haproxy module. The goal is to find the examples in the documentation and save them to a text file for later use in a playbook.

Step 1: Accessing the Module Documentation

First, execute the following command to open the Ansible Navigator interface for the haproxy module:

ansible-navigator doc haproxy

This will bring up the interactive documentation browser where you can navigate through all the details of the module.

Step 2: Filtering for Examples

Once you’re in the documentation, you’ll want to filter out everything except the examples. To do this, simply type:

:{{ examples }}

This command will narrow down the view to show only the example sections for the haproxy module, making it easier to focus on practical use cases.

Step 3: Saving the Examples to a File

Now that you have the examples on-screen, you might want to save them for future use in your playbooks. To save the examples to a text file, execute the following command:

:open

Then, to write the content to a file, specify the desired file path with the :w command. For instance:

:w /tmp/doc_examples_haproxy.yml

This will save all the examples from the documentation to a file at /tmp/doc_examples_haproxy.yml, which you can later reference or include in your Ansible playbooks.