AnsibleByExample

community.general 14.0.0 Released - New Runtime Dependency and Coding Convention Cleanups

Beginner
2026-11-033By Luca Berton

Lesson 1 of 15 in Foundations

Ansible Foundations to Production — full curriculum
  1. 1. Introduction to Ansible and Automation
  2. 2. Installing and Configuring Ansible
  3. 3. Running Ad-Hoc Commands
  4. 4. Writing Your First Playbook
  5. 5. Understanding and Using Modules
  6. 6. Variables and Facts
  7. 7. Conditionals and Loops
  8. 8. Handlers and Idempotency
  9. 9. Structuring Projects with Roles
  10. 10. Inventory Management
  11. 11. Using Ansible Vault for Secrets
  12. 12. Debugging and Troubleshooting
  13. 13. Real-World Automation Examples
  14. 14. Final Project: Deploy a Web Server
  15. 15. Bonus - What's Next with Ansible?
View path overview →

Introduction

community.general is the catch-all Ansible collection that hosts modules, plugins, and inventory sources that do not (yet) have a dedicated collection of their own, maintained by the Ansible community team. Version 14.0.0 was released on 2026-11-02 and follows 13.5.0.

Whats New

New Runtime Dependency: community.library_inventory_filtering_v1

The headline change in this release is not a module or a bugfix, it is a new runtime dependency. Starting with 14.0.0, community.general depends on community.library_inventory_filtering_v1. This dependency is used exclusively by the inventory plugins shipped in the collection, and ansible-galaxy collection install will pull it in automatically.

This matters for anyone who does not install the collection through ansible-galaxy, for example by cloning the repository directly or by extracting a release tarball into a custom collections path. In that case community.library_inventory_filtering_v1 has to be installed manually, otherwise any inventory plugin that relies on it will fail to load. See PR #12302 for details.

archive - zstd Support

The archive module gains zstd as a supported compression format, closing a request open since issue #3455 and implemented in PR #12497. The module was also updated to use context managers when reading tar checksums (PR #12569).

bitwarden Lookup Plugin - sync Option

The bitwarden lookup plugin now accepts a sync option to force a vault sync before performing the lookup, so stale local caches no longer have to be synced out of band before running a playbook.

Code Quality and Internal Cleanups

Most of the remaining entries in this release are non-functional, code-quality maintenance changes that do not alter module behavior:

  • Module utils for alicloud_ecs, hwc_utils, ipa, online, opennebula, pritunl_api, redfish_utils, scaleway, utm_utils, and vexata were updated to follow coding conventions, with no functional change (PR #12984).
  • airbrake_deployment and alerta_customer were updated to follow coding conventions, no functional change (PR #12950).
  • alternatives was updated to follow coding conventions, no functional change (PR #12966).
  • aix_filesystem now uses plain string operations instead of regular expressions for plain-string patterns (PR #12996).
  • aix_lvol now compiles regular expressions once outside of loops instead of on every iteration (PR #12999).
  • apk and awall were refactored to remove usage of the global statement (PR #12925 and PR #12926).
  • The ansible_type test plugin dropped compatibility code required for ansible-core versions older than 2.19 (PR #12919).

None of the above entries change module behavior or playbook-facing options; they are safe to pick up as part of a routine upgrade.

Installing and Verifying the Release

# Install (or upgrade to) community.general 14.0.0
ansible-galaxy collection install community.general:==14.0.0

# Verify the installed version
ansible-galaxy collection list community.general

# Confirm the new runtime dependency was pulled in automatically
ansible-galaxy collection list community.library_inventory_filtering_v1

# Sanity-check that modules load correctly
ansible-doc community.general.archive

If community.general was installed manually (cloned repository or tarball extracted into a custom collections_paths entry rather than through ansible-galaxy), install the new dependency explicitly before using any inventory plugin from the collection:

ansible-galaxy collection install community.library_inventory_filtering_v1

Conclusion

community.general 14.0.0 is a routine release dominated by internal code-quality cleanups, but it introduces one change that requires attention on manual installs: the new runtime dependency on community.library_inventory_filtering_v1 for inventory plugins. Users relying on ansible-galaxy for installation do not need to do anything beyond the usual upgrade command.

All Tutorials