Best practices for repository structure: Is it recommended to host Ansible roles in subdirectories?

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1

Hi everyone,

I am currently working on optimizing our project structure. We are using a monorepo approach and I am considering placing our Ansible roles inside a specific subfolder (e.g., /ansible/roles/my_role/).

I have two main questions regarding this setup:

  1. Architecture: Is hosting an Ansible role within a subdirectory of a larger repository considered a standard “best practice”? Or is it strongly recommended to maintain roles in their own dedicated repositories?
  2. Technical Implementation: If the subdirectory approach is acceptable, how can I configure the requirements.yml file to correctly target and install only that specific subdirectory using ansible-galaxy role install?

I have looked into the documentation, but I am struggling to find the correct syntax for partial repository imports. Any guidance, community feedback, or links to relevant resources would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance for your help!

2

Hi @Yoann.

Organize your roles into collections. One collection = one repository. You can then pull the collections with ansible-galaxy collection install -r requirements.yml and use the roles you need in the project. Yeah, it will probably pull more roles that you really need but if you keep your collection with a well define scope, even that will not be an issue.

I would say this is the “best practice” way and most easy one to understand and implement.