A guide to Ansible, a tool that uses YAML instructions to configure and automate servers over SSH. It covers playbooks, tasks, variables, handlers, conditions, and loops.

Use it when writing or reviewing Ansible playbooks and their project structure.

It helps you understand how to organise repeatable server setup and deployment work without manually changing each machine.

ansible — Skill for Claude Code by vinnie357/claude-skills

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add vinnie357/claude-skills --skill ansible

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vinnie357/claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install ansible, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 5 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/ansible/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/ansible)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/ansible"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/ansible/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/ansible"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/ansible.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 42 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 2,025 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan B 2 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00042	$0.02025
Opus 5.5	$0.00017	$0.00810
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00008	$0.00405
Haiku 4.5	$0.00004	$0.00202

Measured 2mo ago against content hash b86225c087ab, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade B, and why

ansible scanned grade B with 2 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2mo ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Asks for rootmediumPrivilege escalation

A mod that escalates privileges can change anything on the machine, not only the project.

- { name: alice, groups: sudo }

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

name: curl

plugins/tools/ansible/skills/ansible/SKILL.md · 271 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 271 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Ansible

Activate when working with Ansible playbooks, tasks, variables, handlers, conditionals, loops, or setting up an Ansible project from scratch.

Anti-fabrication

This skill follows core:anti-fabrication. The claim area is playbook/task/variable behavior — precedence order, module params, CLI flags — which drifts across Ansible releases. Verified against ansible-core 2.21.2 (pipx-installed live, claude-skills-223): the variable precedence order (role defaults < host_vars < play vars < vars_files < extra-vars) was confirmed with four live adjacent-pair test playbooks, not assumed from docs, and when: list ANDing plus check_mode: false were confirmed correct. Re-verify against a current ansible-playbook --version before asserting a flag or precedence rule this skill doesn't cover; see plugins/tools/ansible/skills/sources.toml for the full per-claim record.

What Is Ansible

Ansible is an agentless, push-based automation tool. The control node (your machine) connects to managed nodes (servers) over SSH and runs tasks declared in YAML files called playbooks. There is no agent to install on managed nodes — only Python and SSH access are required.

Key properties:

Idempotent: Running a playbook multiple times produces the same result. Tasks check current state before making changes.
Declarative: You describe the desired state, not step-by-step instructions.
Push-based: The control node initiates all connections.

Available Skills

Skill	When to load
`ansible`	Core playbooks, tasks, vars, loops — this file
`ansible-inventory`	Configuring hosts, groups, group_vars, dynamic inventory
`ansible-roles`	Reusable role structure, Galaxy, Jinja2 templates
`ansible-vault`	Encrypting secrets, vault passwords, vault IDs
`ansible-testing`	Molecule test scenarios, Testinfra, CI integration

Install

pip install ansible          # recommended via pip
brew install ansible         # macOS Homebrew alternative
ansible --version            # verify

Read the full file on GitHub · 271 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

references/playbook-patterns.md 5.8 KB

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

2mo ago First seen · 271 lines · 42 tokens per session scan B b86225c087ab

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ansible is a skill published in the GitHub repository vinnie357/claude-skills (27 stars, last pushed 14d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 42 tokens to every session and 2,025 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it B with 2 findings (asks for root, makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

DevOps and cloud

ansible next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
ansiblevinnie357/claude-skills	Skill	27	14d ago	MIT	B	42	Claude Code
imagegenopenai/codex	Skill	134k	today	Apache-2.0	A	113	Codex
local-ai-agentsmicrosoft/ai-agents-for-beginners	Skill	79k	2d ago	MIT	A	200	Claude Code, Codex
playwright-climicrosoft/playwright	Skill	100k	today	Apache-2.0	A	19	Claude Code
browser-automationopenclaw/openclaw	Skill	394k	today	MIT	A	36	Claude Code
systematic-debuggingobra/superpowers	Skill	315k	6d ago	MIT	A	21	Claude Code
next-cache-components-adoptionvercel/next.js	Skill	143k	today	MIT	A	95	Claude Code

ansible

Getting it into your agent

Wrote this? Show the measurements

What it costs to keep this loaded

Grade B, and why

Asks for rootmediumPrivilege escalation

Makes network callslowCapability

How it starts

Ansible

Anti-fabrication

What Is Ansible

Available Skills

Install

What ships with it

What this file has done since we first saw it

ansible compared with skills from other repositories