# Organize my playbooks, inventories and roles

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/organize-my-playbooks-inventories-and-roles/38034>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Created:** [May 27, 2023, 6:57am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/organize-my-playbooks-inventories-and-roles/38034 "2023-05-27T06:57:51Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Niki\_Kovacs](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/7ab992/32.png) [@Niki\_Kovacs](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Niki_Kovacs)\
**Post date:** [May 27, 2023, 6:57am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/organize-my-playbooks-inventories-and-roles/38034/1 "2023-05-27T06:57:51Z")

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Hi,

I’ve spent this last couple of months experimenting extensively with Ansible. So far I’ve only worked on a series of VMs using Vagrant and KVM on my workstation. I’ve become reasonably proficient with `ansible.cfg`, inventory files and playbooks. I’ve already written my first roles and know how to properly organize them in a directory subtree with tasks, files, handlers etc. Looks like I’m beginning to wrap my head around this, though I must say Ansible is a hell of a beast and the learning curve is quite steep.

I feel the time has become to use it for my everyday work. Before I dive head first into using inventories and playbooks and roles for my everyday work, I’m facing the following problem. **How do I organize all this wealth of files to come intelligently?** How will all this look like in a year? How can I avoid having myriads of redundant playbooks scattered all over semi-redundant Git repositories?

I’ve given this some reflection for a couple days, and here’s what I came up with.

**1**. One central Git repository where I store pretty much **everything except roles**. Here’s what this would look like:

```auto
$ tree -F
.
├── campanula/
│ ├── ansible.cfg
│ ├── inventory
│ └── roles/
├── dedibox/
│ ├── ansible.cfg
│ ├── inventory
│ └── roles/
├── microlinux/
│ ├── alphamule.yml
│ ├── ansible.cfg
│ ├── inventory
│ ├── nestor.yml
│ ├── proxy.yml
│ └── roles/
└── scholae/
    ├── ansible.cfg
    ├── inventory
    ├── pc-direction.yml
    ├── pc-info.yml
    ├── portable.yml
    ├── proxy.yml
    ├── roles/
    ├── sauvegarde.yml
    └── serveur.yml

```

A little explanation on what is what here:

- `microlinux` is my own office, with a proxy, a backup server and my main workstation.
- `scholae` is our local school with about three dozen machines (servers, desktop clients, laptops) all running Rocky Linux
- `campanula` is a small company in Belgium
- `dedibox` is the directory for all my public Internet-facing server

**2**. All these various playbooks use a series of `roles`. I would store all the roles separately in another Git repository and aim for reusability. So I would have something like a `rockylinux-8-roles` repo containing a series of roles like `configure_shell`, `configure_repos`, `update_system`, `install_base`, `install_extras`, etc.

Notice the directory tree above has a series of empty `roles/` directories. Now this is where I would import the roles from GitHub (with the corresponding `.gitignore` files of course).

So far this makes sense to me in theory, but before diving into this, I thought I’d share this idea with you. I’m curious about your way of doing things and your eventual suggestions.

Cheers from the sunny South of France,

Niki