Ansible - Roles 📜

Description 👀

Roles are a way of automatically loading related vars_files, tasks, and handlers based on a known file structure. They can also help you better organize your files, especially if you’re using Ansible to deploy multiple apps or systems that have similar roles. Roles are a way of grouping variables, tasks, files, templates, and modules in a way that makes your infrastructure easier to manage.

Roles introduce a set of best practices that must be followed.

• tasks are to go in the tasks/ directory
• vars are to go in the vars/ directory
• defaults are to go in the defaults/ directory
• handlers are to go in the handlers/ directory
• templates are to go in the templates/ directory

Basics 📝

• create a role

    ansible-galaxy init <role-name>
  

    # generated role directory structure
    <role-name>/
        ├── defaults
        │   └── main.yml
        ├── files
        ├── handlers
        │   └── main.yml
        ├── meta
        │   └── main.yml
        ├── tasks
        │   └── main.yml
        ├── templates
        ├── tests
        │   ├── inventory
        │   └── test.yml
        └── vars
        │   └── main.yml
        ├── README.md
  

  • how does my playbook know where to find the role?
    • add a roles directory to the playbook directory
    • add the role to the /etc/ansible/roles directory
      • this is the default location ansible looks for roles defined in the /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg file

• search for existing community roles

    ansible-galaxy search <role-name>
  

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