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Accepted
Mike
Asked: 2016-02-20 05:28:36 +0800 CST

local ansible-playbook run playbook with vars for role

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I'm pretty new to ansible so I might be setting up things wrong. My idea is I have certain classes of servers. (monitor,web,db for example)

I want to run a local ansible run on them so my play for monitor looks something like

---

# plays/monitor.yaml

- hosts: mongo
  connection: local
  hosts: localhost
  become: yes
  become_user: root
  roles:
    - ../roles/users
    - ../roles/monitor
  vars:
    sensu_install_client: true
    sensu_install_server: true

My roles/monitor/tasks/main.yml looks like

---

# roles/monitor/tasks/main.yaml

- include: common.yml

- include: server.yml
  when: sensu_install_server

- include: client.yml
  when: sensu_install_client

I want to be able to pass in vars so includes will happen in the role. So when I setup my api instances I can do something like

vars:
   sensu_install_client: true

In the play and it will just include the client.yml from the monitor role.

ansible

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    It's not clear to me why this is not working. I can't see a problem. But let me give you some general recommendations, maybe that'll help you too.

    Best practice is to have your playbooks on the root level. Have a look at this structure. With that setup, you do not need to specify the path to the roles as Ansible automatically expects roles in the roles directory relative to the playbook. Then your roles section in the playbook is much cleaner:

    roles:
  - users
  - monitor

    Instead of defining global variables to trigger actions inside roles you can use two other approaches.

    1. role parameters

    Roles can have parameters. If you want to pass parameters you simply have to convert it to a dictionary:

    roles:
  - users
  - role: monitor
    sensu_install_client: true
    sensu_install_server: true

    The variables sensu_install_client and sensu_install_server then are available only in the role monitor. This is a litte more cleaner and also makes it clear to anybody these vars will be used in this role, not in the users role.

    2. tags

    Tags actually are the way how to trigger specific parts of a playbook/roles. Tags though are passed from the command line and not by hardcoded variables in the playbook. Imagine your role main.yml looks like this:

    ---

# roles/monitor/tasks/main.yaml

- include: common.yml
  tags: always

- include: server.yml
  tags: server

- include: client.yml
  tags: client

    The tag always is special and will run the tagged tasks... well you guessed it... always.

    Now you would call your playbook like this:

    ansible-playbook monitor.yml --tags server

    or

    ansible-playbook monitor.yml --tags client

    Or if you want to run both you even could do:

    ansible-playbook monitor.yml --tags "client,server"

    If you use this, don't forget to tag your users role accordingly, or it will not be ran at all.

    If you do not specify any --tags all tasks are executed, if you want to filter specific tags you can use the --skip-tags option

    ansible-playbook monitor.yml --skip-tags "server"

    You could even filter the always tag.

    ansible-playbook monitor.yml --tags "server" --skip-tags "always"
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