Best way to add reusable provisioning steps to existing roles

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1

What would be the best method to add reusable provisioning steps to existing roles? I am looking to try and accomplish the following:

  • Ideally this could be it’s own role, or in some way reusable so I could tie it to any role
  • It would pull in all the needed parameters from group or host vars
  • It would only be called if I sent something like ansible-playbook -e “provision=yes”, otherwise the role would run as written without provisioning an instance
  • I would like a way to easily extend this for additional providers (e.g. EC2, VMWare, GCE, etc)
    I have been able to add provisioning steps into an existing role by using a separate task, but I feel like there is a better and more reusable way to approach this. Please let me know if additional clarification is needed. Thanks.
2

I actually tackle this another way. I write provisioning playbooks
(not a role) that will create the server on the provider. And then
when it's finished, run some bootstrapping steps. After that is done,
use add_host to add it to the right group and then include the
role-level playbook.

This way the roles don't need to know anything about provisioning. The
step to provision new servers is a different command and as soon as a
server is provisioned it's handed off to the appropriate roles to get
it configured. And because our inventory is dynamic the new server
will be included in subsequent runs too.

3

Yep, use roles to describe the states and behaviors, and include those roles in multiple playbooks as appropriate.

If you have a configure.yml as a playbook, the “provision.yml” could just include it as the very last line of the playbook, making it easy to run things together using the “add_hosts” trick as described in (for example) the EC2 guide.

http://docs.ansible.com/guide_aws.html

4

Thank you for the suggestions. I have implemented and tested them and it’s all working great.