Deploy directory tree, if the tree exists in files-templates - how do I approach host specific files tree conditionally?

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Deploy directory tree: if the tree exists in files-templates - how do I approach host specific files tree conditionally?

Please advise me on an approach I should follow during my implementation of files tree deployment to a target machine, regardless of whether the tree exists or not among files or templates on a control machine.

Should I use a boolean Ansible host variable, like a flag, say, deploy_it equal to false|true to indicate manually that I have a files tree to be copied to a host?

Or can I implement in a task a kind of look-up inside role-name/templates/{{ hostname }}/*/ or role-name/files/{{ hostname }}/*/ to auto-detect if the files tree is present for a particular host’s name? That way I would not have any other flags to be added/changed for a particular host when a host is added to or excluded from the play, other than the files’ presence on the control machine. (I have the exact host name among variables and can insert it into a path to be checked.)

May be templates/{{ hostname }}/*/ or files/{{ hostname }}/*/ at the playbook top-level directory, but that way I am incurring the role files tree (tasks, handlers, defaults and so on) to be split into two places - the role dir. and the top level of the play dir., which I am in doubt about.

Id est:

At control machine, in particular role directory the tree is:

templates
└── dot-config
    ├── host-name-01
    │   └── foo
    │       ├── bar-x
    │       │   ├── a.conf
    │       │   └── b.conf
    │       └── bar-y
    │           ├── c.conf
    │           └── d.conf
    └── host-name-02
        └── foo
            ├── bar-x
            │   ├── a.conf
            │   ├── b.conf
            │   └── c.conf
            └── bar-y
                ├── d.conf
                ├── e.conf
                └── f.conf

The parts of the tree above are selected by a host name

and are deployed at target machine as

.config
└── foo
    ├── bar-x
    │   ├── smth-a.conf
    │   └── smth-b.conf
    └── bar-y
        ├── smth-c.conf
        └── smth-d.conf

What is an optimal approach to launch deploy if the tree exists?
And do not have any other flags to be added/changed for a particular host, when a host is added to or excluded from the play. Files presence at the control machine is the only flag.

2

To do what you’re describing, I’d first run an ansible.builtin.find task to get a list of all the *.conf files for a target host, followed by a copy task that loops over that list. If no files are found for a particular host, then the list is empty and the copy nicely devolves into a no-op.

But my instinct is to not do it this way. You’ve traded maintaining host-specific files on each host for maintaining host-specific files in one project. While that is a small improvement, it’s not that much of a win for whoever has to maintain those files.

A more canonical, Ansible way to do this is to have a template for each of the various *.conf files, with host_vars and group_vars providing values as appropriate for each host to generate via ansible.builtin.template the custom, correct .conf file(s) for the target hosts. This is more work up front, but it pays off pretty soon. You’ll be able to achieve a high level of consistency among your deployed files which would be almost impossible to achieve when manually maintaining separate host-specific sets of files.

Let us know what you come up with. Good luck!