Playbooks in a subdirectory, not next to group_vars

ansibleansible-playbook

Does anyone know how to put playbooks into folders, but share the same roles, group_vars, and other stuff typically located at the root dir?

Here's what I'd like to have:

root_dir:
- group_vars
- roles
- inventory
- playbooks
  - my_playbook.yml
- site.yml
- deploy.yml

Our root dir is getting pretty big now and I'd like to split out some playbooks into their own folder (shown as playbooks/ above). An identical tiny playbook fails to run when inside a directory (say, playbooks/) vs at the root dir, because it doesn't grab stuff from group_vars.

I can partially work around this, and run a playbook inside my playbooks/
directory:

- hosts: host_group
  sudo: true
  gather_facts: false
  vars_files:
  - ../group_vars/all/main.yml

This picks up the vars defined in main.yml. However, it's not clear to me if this would add group variables defined in group_vars/, as opposed to the explicitly specificed ../group_vars/.

Thanks!

Best Answer

Ansible will pick up group_vars without stating path explicitly:

Here is the example directory structure in /tmp/ansible:

/tmp/ansible
├── group_vars
│   └── test_group.yml
├── inventory
├── playbooks
│   └── foo.yml
└── site.yml

Inventory file:

[test_group]
localhost

Main Playbook site.yml:

# site.yml
---
- include: playbooks/foo.yml

Secondary Playbook foo.yml:

---
- hosts: localhost

  tasks:

      - debug: var=foo

Group Variables test_group.yml:

foo: bar

Here are all the ways to execute the secondary playbook:

  • From root folder using relative path /tmp/ansible:

    ansible-playbook -i inventory playbooks/foo.yml -c local

PLAY [localhost] **************************************************************

GATHERING FACTS ***************************************************************
ok: [localhost]

TASK: [debug var=foo] *********************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
    "var": {
        "foo": "bar"
    }
}

PLAY RECAP ********************************************************************
localhost                  : ok=2    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0

  • From Playbooks subfolder with inventory in parent path /tmp/ansible/playbooks:

    ansible-playbook -i ../inventory foo.yml -c local

PLAY [localhost] **************************************************************

GATHERING FACTS ***************************************************************
ok: [localhost]

TASK: [debug var=foo] *********************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
    "var": {
        "foo": "bar"
    }
}

PLAY RECAP ********************************************************************
localhost                  : ok=2    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0

As we can see in the above examples, ansible-playbook will look for variables based on the path of inventory file or folder were ansible was executed from. Playbooks can be separated without additional effort.

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