Dependencies

ansible-core is deliberately spare in its dependency footprint. Per AGENTS.md: prefer Python stdlib, prefer in-tree code, only add a dependency when there's no clean alternative.

Runtime dependencies

From requirements.txt:

Package	Constraint	Why it's required
jinja2	>= 3.1.0	Templating engine. The 3.1.0 floor is for native macro support
PyYAML	>= 5.1	YAML parsing — 5.1+ for Python 3.8+ support
cryptography	(any)	Vault AES, password hashing, hashing helpers
packaging	(any)	PEP 440 version parsing and specifier evaluation
resolvelib	>= 0.8.0, < 2.0.0	Galaxy collection dependency resolver

That's it for runtime. ansible-core deliberately keeps the surface tight — no requests, no boto3, no kubernetes-client. Modules that need those things ship in collections that declare their own optional dependencies.

Optional runtime dependencies

Several features have optional dependencies that aren't installed by default:

• pywinrm — for the winrm connection plugin.
• pypsrp — for the psrp connection plugin.
• pexpect — for the expect module's interactive command handling.
• passlib — for the password_hash filter's bcrypt/sha512_crypt support.
• python-libxml2 / lxml — only used in the xml module (now in community.general).

Optional deps are declared in the relevant module/plugin documentation. The plugin loader emits an AnsibleError if a feature requiring an unmet optional dep is invoked.

Build dependencies

From pyproject.toml:

[build-system]
requires = ["setuptools >= 77.0.3, <= 80.3.1"]
build-backend = "setuptools.build_meta"

The lower bound is for PEP 639 license metadata support; the upper bound is the version actually tested in this release. Setuptools is the only build dep.

Test dependencies

ansible-test brings its own test-time dependencies, declared per environment under test/lib/ansible_test/_data/requirements/. These vary by Python version and test type:

• sanity.<python_version>.txt — pylint, pep8, pyyaml, pylint plugins, mypy stubs.
• units.txt — pytest, pytest-mock, coverage.
• integration.txt — minimal; integration tests run real playbooks against containers.
• Per-target requirements under test/integration/targets/<name>/files/requirements.txt.

hacking/update-sanity-requirements.py regenerates the pinned test requirements.

Python version support

Code area	Minimum Python
Controller (lib/ansible/cli/, lib/ansible/executor/, lib/ansible/plugins/, etc.)	3.12 — enforced by _PY_MIN = (3, 12) in lib/ansible/cli/__init__.py
Modules + module_utils	Wider range, declared by _PY_MIN in lib/ansible/module_utils/basic.py

The wider module range is necessary because modules ship to remote targets, which may run older OS images with older Pythons. The controller is on the user's workstation or CI runner and can require newer Python.

pyproject.toml advertises requires-python = ">=3.12" — that's the controller minimum.

Vendored / embedded code

Some third-party code is included in the tree rather than imported as a dep:

• lib/ansible/_vendor/ — has only an __init__.py; reserved for future vendoring.
• lib/ansible/module_utils/six/ — Python 2/3 compatibility shim. Largely unused on the controller (Python 3.12+) but ships with modules to support older Python on targets.
• lib/ansible/module_utils/distro/ — embeds the distro package for Linux distribution detection on targets.
• lib/ansible/module_utils/compat/ — small compatibility helpers for the wider Python range modules support.
• lib/ansible/_internal/_wrapt.py (1,015 lines) — vendored pieces of wrapt's ObjectProxy primitives, used by the datatag system.

License compatibility

Per AGENTS.md, all dependencies must be compatible with:

• GPL-3.0-or-later for lib/ansible/ (excluding module_utils/).
• BSD-2-Clause for lib/ansible/module_utils/.

The current dependency set complies: Jinja2 (BSD), PyYAML (MIT), cryptography (Apache 2.0 / BSD), packaging (Apache 2.0 / BSD), resolvelib (ISC).

Package metadata

pyproject.toml declares the PyPI package as ansible-core:

[project]
requires-python = ">=3.12"
name = "ansible-core"
license = "GPL-3.0-or-later"
license-files = ["COPYING", "licenses/*.txt"]

The CLIs are exported as console scripts so pip install ansible-core puts ansible, ansible-playbook, ansible-galaxy, ansible-vault, ansible-doc, ansible-inventory, ansible-config, ansible-console, ansible-pull, and ansible-test on $PATH.

Cross-links

• Getting started — install and dev shell.
• Patterns and conventions — when (not) to add a dep.
• Tooling — the test runner.