Category: DevOps

Short note on ansible/ansible galaxy:

• ansible-galaxy takes care of install the roles. Regardless if defined via a requirements.yaml or defined via the “dependencies:” section in the meta/main.yaml of a role.
• ansible-playbook/ansible-pull doesn’t care about installation of roles, it just wants the defined dependencies (same meta/main.yaml) to be present. Here is the role_path important.

Knowing this it allows you to fulfill many usage- and development patterns. Like developing company wide reusable ansible roles with multiple teams (DevOps).

Example:

Shared roles using gitlab repositories

Define the role dependencies in the corresponding section of the role’s meta/main.yml.

dependencies:
  
  - src: https://gitlab%2Bdeploy-token-13:xxx@gitlab.example.com/ansible/shared/nginx.git
    scm: git
    version: master
    name: nginx

  - src: https://gitlab%2Bdeploy-token-13:xxx@gitlab.example.com/ansible/shared/postfix.git
    scm: git
    version: master
    name: postfix

Usage

The installation of roles (and their dependencies) and running the playbook becomes a simple two-liner:

# install roles and their dependencies
ansible-galaxy install "git+https://gitlab+deploy-token-19:xxx@gitlab.example.com/ansible/products/product.git,master" --force

# apply the playbook (using the defined and installed dependencies)
ansible-playbook -i localhost, /root/.ansible/roles/product/product/playbook.yml