Cannot run playbook from collection

[jonathansloman]

ISSUE TYPE

• Bug Report

SUMMARY

When using ansible-playbook directly, it is possible to specify a playbook from a collection, eg
ansible-playbook collection.playbook -i inventory

This will run playbooks/playbook.yml from within the collection.

However, running ansible-navigator run collection.playbook -i inventory reports that the playbook could not be found.

This is with the collection present in the 'collections' directory at the location the command is being run from, as described in the documentation. The collection does show up if I run ansible-navigator collections

ANSIBLE-NAVIGATOR VERSION

ansible-navigator 26.1.3

CONFIGURATION

none

LOG FILE

2026-03-12T18:20:13.901262+00:00 CRITICAL 'ansible_navigator.actions.run_playbook._handle_message' Unhandled message from runner queue, discarded: {'event': 'verbose', 'uuid': '88e0f55e
-6559-4a46-bfcc-696bf4864fdb', 'counter': 1, 'stdout': '\x1b[0;31m[ERROR]: the playbook: mycollection.myplaybook could not be found\x1b[0m', 'start_line': 0, 'end_line': 1, 'runne
r_ident': 'a1a41bbf-566e-4b1a-a13d-7814fdc59b8e', 'created': '2026-03-12T18:20:13.900478+00:00'}

STEPS TO REPRODUCE

Install a collection containing playbooks in a playbooks directory in the 'collections' folder - in our case we install from github:
ansible-galaxy collection install git+https://github.com/mycollection.git,1.0.0 -p ./collections

Run a playbook from the collection:

ansible-navigator run mycollection.playbook -i inventory

EXPECTED RESULTS

Expected the playbook to run.

ACTUAL RESULTS

[ERROR]: the playbook: mycollection.playbook could not be found

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

execution environment being used: ghcr.io/ansible/community-ansible-dev-tools:latest