On 05/07/2014 11:35 PM, Strahinja Kustudić wrote:
> I have been using Ansible for a few months now and it has been a
> blast. I think I got the hang of how Ansible works pretty good, but
> I'm still not sure about what is the best way to reuse roles.
>
> Let's take the "nginx" role as an example. We have Nginx installed on
> a lot of servers, but besides the common steps of installing nginx,
> the configuration files are a lot different (some servers only have
> http, some have SSL as well, so they need certificates, different
> virtual hosts, etc).
>
> What I did is created a variable called *nginx_server_type*, which you
> set to a server name, or group name (which shares the same
> configuration files) and then use it like this:
>
> |
> - name: Copy /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
> template: src={{ nginx_server_type }}/etc/nginx/nginx.conf.j2
> dest=/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
> mode=0644
> owner=root
> group=root
> notify: reload nginx
>
> - name: Copy /etc/nginx/
> copy: src={{ nginx_server_type }}/etc/nginx/
> dest=/etc/nginx/
> notify: reload nginx
>
> |
>
> Then you need to create directories inside *templates *and *files
> *which are called {{ nginx_server_type }} and put the configuration
> files in them. So basically every time I need a new server, I modify a
> role by adding template and configuration files for that server.
>
> This problem basically comes up for any role which is not the same for
> all servers. Is there a better way to deal with this? How do you do it?
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What you want is very common. I think the most elegant way to handle
this is to add a new keyword in the role dependency statement that would
allow to override templates and files on a "common" role by another role
that depends on it. So, in your case you could create an "nginx_common"
role as well as several "nginx_sometype" roles that would depend on
"nginx_common" role and provide any templates/files to override the ones
in the "nginx_common" role. That way you do not have to "pollute" your
"nginx_common" role directory with templates/files that are not actually
"common" or conflict with each other. Instead, you keep separate
"nginx_sometype" roles and each one of them can provide its own set of
templates/files that will override the ones in "nginx_common" role "on
the fly".
Look at the following thread, for a proposal and discussion around this:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/ansible-project/override/ansible-project/9xRyYIOdSro/KustjP725kQJ
If you find my proposal interesting, it would probably be more
appropriate to make any comments at the other thread to keep relevant
discussion at one place.
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