Ansible – do you have to include/import from other files

You could use with_fileglob to get the list of files from your template directory and use filters to strip the j2 extension like this:

- name: create x template
  template:
    src: "{{ item }}"
    dest: /tmp/{{ item | basename | regex_replace('\.j2$', '') }}
  with_fileglob:
    - ../templates/*.j2

I'm not familiar with PostgreSQL so I'm unsure of the contents of the various configuration files you mentioned, but if you need to allow multiple roles to contribute to a single configuration file, I've accomplished this in one of two ways depending on what the configuration file supports:

1. Use a configuration file with lots of include statements to include additional configuration files located in sub-directories. This works well with something like Apache for rewrite rules, application-specific configuration directives, and virtual hosts.

2. Assemble the configuration file from multiple partial configuration files stored in a directory using the assemble module. I've used this method to construct a master.cf file for Postfix as I had a postfix role and another role that needed to add to the Postfix master.cf file. So I modified the postfix role to create a /etc/postfix/master.d directory and a handler that assembles the files in that directory into a master.cf file. Unfortunately, as you pointed out, since I can't call the handler in the postfix role from another role, I had to duplicate that handler in my additional role. It's slightly less than idea but it works and it's idempotent.