Working with roles
We have seen how we can automate simple tasks, but what we have seen up till now will not solve all your problems. This is because playbooks are very good at executing operations, but are not very good for configuring huge amounts of machines, because they will soon become messy. To solve this, Ansible has roles.
My definition of a role is a set of playbooks, templates, files, or variables to achieve a specific goal. For instance, we could have a database role and a web server role so that those configurations stay cleanly separated.
Before starting to look inside a role, let's talk about a project organization.
Project organization
In the last few years, I've worked on multiple Ansible repositories for multiple organizations and many of them were very chaotic. To ensure that your repository is easy to manage, I'm going to give you a template that I always use.
First of all, I always create three files in the root
folder:
ansible.cfg
: A small configuration file to explain to...