How are roles in Ansible best defined?

How are roles in Ansible best defined?

Roles let you automatically load related vars, files, tasks, handlers, and other Ansible artifacts based on a known file structure. After you group your content in roles, you can easily reuse them and share them with other users.

Should I use Ansible roles?

Ansible roles are an excellent way to structure and define what your servers should look like. It is worth learning how to use them even if you could rely solely on playbooks for each of your servers.

What is the use of Ansible playbook?

An Ansible® playbook is a blueprint of automation tasks—which are complex IT actions executed with limited or no human involvement. Ansible playbooks are executed on a set, group, or classification of hosts, which together make up an Ansible inventory.

What are the Ansible roles?

Roles provide a framework for fully independent, or interdependent collections of variables, tasks, files, templates, and modules. In Ansible, the role is the primary mechanism for breaking a playbook into multiple files. This simplifies writing complex playbooks, and it makes them easier to reuse.

Where can I find Ansible roles?

Ansible will search for roles in the following way:

• A roles/ directory, relative to the playbook file.
• By default, in /etc/ansible/roles.

How do you call a role in playbook?

Section 2: Breaking your site. yml playbook into the newly created apache-simple role

1. Step 1: Backup. Make a backup copy of site.
2. Step 2: Add play definition/Invoke role.
3. Step 3: Add default variables.
4. Step 4: Add variables.
5. Step 5: Create role handler.
6. Step 6: Add role tasks.
7. Step 7: Download templates.

How do you reuse Ansible roles?

Ansible offers two ways to re-use files and roles in a playbook: dynamic and static.

1. For dynamic re-use, add an include_* task in the tasks section of a play: include_role. include_tasks. include_vars.
2. For static re-use, add an import_* task in the tasks section of a play: import_role. import_tasks.

How do I create Ansible roles?

Create ansible role from scratch | Ansible roles example

1. Step 1: Create Ansible Role – vhost.
2. Step 2: Create ansible tasks.
3. Step 3: Create ansible handlers.
4. Step 4: Create ansible template.
5. Step 5: Remove unwanted directories (Optional)
6. Step 6: Create post execution tasks.
7. Step 7: Create ansible role playbook.

What are the best practices for documentation in Ansible?

One thing you will definitely want to do though, is use the “roles” organization feature, which is documented as part of the main playbooks page. See Playbook Roles and Include Statements. You absolutely should be using roles. Roles are great. Use roles. Roles!

How to execute a playbook in Ansible in order?

Ansible executes your playbook in this order: 1 Any pre_tasks defined in the play. 2 Any handlers triggered by pre_tasks. 3 Each role listed in roles:, in the order listed. 4 Any tasks defined in the play. 5 Any handlers triggered by the roles or tasks. 6 Any post_tasks defined in the play. 7 Any handlers triggered by post_tasks.

Why are groups named after things in Ansible?

Having groups named after things like webservers and dbservers is repeated in the examples because it’s a very powerful concept. This allows playbooks to target machines based on role, as well as to assign role specific variables using the group variable system. See Playbook Roles and Include Statements.

Why is it important to prefix variables in Ansible?

Prefixing variables is particularly vital with developing reusable and portable roles. You can also dramatically improve the readability of your plays for a bit of extra verbosity with using human-meaningful names that communicate their purpose and usage to others or even yourself at a later date. 3. Use Native YAML Syntax