Ash_Powell
September 4, 2017, 3:48pm
1
This may be a silly question, but I’ve searched around and can’t find anyone asking a similar thing.
Is it possible for Ansible roles to be stored in a source control repository (such as Git)?
Scenario;
We have an ansible server and currently, all of our roles are stored in /etc/ansible/roles
Is there a way that we can have these files stored in source control so that I can edit the file from my local machine, push into a repo and then ansible pulls the files before running the playbook/role?
That’s not only possible but highly reconmended as well.
Dick
Ash_Powell
September 5, 2017, 7:27am
3
Fantastic!
Are there any guides or walkthroughs showing the best/correct way of setting this up?
Like I say, I’ve had a search myself but there’s nothing specific that I can find.
Probably lots of ‘correct’ ways of setting this up, but if you want a suggestion of how to start, this is something that Sam Doran talked about in his Ansiblefest London talk earlier this year. The video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gEKmsuJr7s&feature=youtu.be
(other interesting presentations here: https://www.ansible.com/videos-ansiblefest-london-2017 , by the way).
Hope this helps,
Jon
Ash_Powell
September 5, 2017, 2:04pm
5
Thanks for the links.
Watching the video, it mentions about storing the Playbook in a Git repo, but nothing about storing the roles in a Git repo.
I’m referring to the files that (by default) sit on “/etc/ansible/roles/”
I, personally, don't store anything under /etc/ansible (other than /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg).
I have a directory in my user home that has the following structure:
ansible/
This whole directory is a git repository and I cd to that directory before running ansible-playbook.
So, just like you are suggesting, I can work on the roles or libraries or playlists on a develeopment machine (my workstation) and then I can push the repo and pull it down on the production server from which ansible is normally run.
I don't know that this is the best way, but it certainly works.
Steve
Ash_Powell
September 5, 2017, 3:33pm
7
I’m not sure that this would work for us as we might have multiple people using/running the same role so it would need to be a common location (ie not a home folder)
In my case I really only have one or two people that would be running ansible, but I have things set up on a role account, so that anyone that needs to would log into the same account.
Another option, I suppose, would be to include a Makefile or something that "installs" your roles from the git repo to /etc/ansible.
But really, there wouldn't be anything fundamentally wrong with /etc/ansible/roles itself being a git repository, probably.
Steve
Storing roles in home directories is not a problem.
Relevant for this exercise:
[defaults]
You could even store the .ansible.cfg in the git repo and symlink
Dick
If I recall from the talk, the suggestion was each role would have a git repo of its own, then required roles are loaded using a requirements.yml filehttps://stackoverflow.com/questions/25230376/how-to-automatically-install-ansible-galaxy-roles
We don’t have lots of people updating roles at the moment so we have all ansible config in a single source code repo and users pull and update their local copies. As noted you have to change ansible.cfg to pick up roles, library and plugins from relative paths but it works ok for us.
The magic world you have to look for in google is “requirements.yml”
Cev_Ing
September 6, 2017, 12:14pm
12
We use dot dirs, which makes it necessary to run all jobs from the Ansible directory.
$ grep ‘./’ ansible.cfg
We have a repository with all Ansible files and each user using Ansible has to check out a private copy of the Ansible directory. This makes it very easy to implement changes without affecting other people.
We have one repository as our “ansible root” (e.g. /etc/ansible). This repository includes all our roles (as git submodules ) that are in separate repositories. This gives a lot of versioning power, but also nice separation.
total 264K
cbeb1ea0e62793a2e4f721c65e18759ba5904a86 roles/adminer (v2.0.3)
Entering ‘roles/adminer’git@github.com :Oefenweb/ansible-adminer.git (fetch)git@github.com :Oefenweb/ansible-adminer.git (push)git@github.com :Oefenweb/ansible-ansible.git (fetch)git@github.com :Oefenweb/ansible-ansible.git (push)
I hope this gives some insight
Two links… Regards, JYL