# Playbook organization with var files **URL:** \ **Category:** Ansible Project\ **Tags:** aws\ **Created:** [July 16, 2014, 9:57pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/playbook-organization-with-var-files/15684 "2014-07-16T21:57:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Michael\_Peters](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c2a13f/32.png) [@Michael\_Peters](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_Peters)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2014, 9:57pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/playbook-organization-with-var-files/15684/1 "2014-07-16T21:57:40Z")
I'm looking for advice about how to organize my playbooks. Not so much the content as their structure on the file system. Currently I have all of my configuration management (role-level) playbooks at the top level with things like common.yml, app.yml, db.yml, etc. These correspond directly to roles and are pretty much just like the examples in [http://docs.ansible.com/playbooks\_best\_practices.html#directory-layout](http://docs.ansible.com/playbooks_best_practices.html#directory-layout) (along with a site.yml to run through them all for the whole cluster). But I also have a bunch of playbooks for doing various things like rolling upgrades of certain applications, updating configurations of other applications, creating DB snapshots and replication, AWS server creation, etc. I've started to accumulate a lot of these and have started to put them into a plays/ directory organized into per-topic subdirectories. This involved a little bit of rewriting so that all of the paths (files, templates, etc) need "../../" path prefixes since they were being loaded relative to the playbook and not the cwd. Not too bad. But this means that the variables in group\_vars, host\_vars, etc aren't loaded automatically. I've tried putting boilerplate "vars\_files" to load everything it needs that looks something like this:   vars\_files:     - ../../group\_vars/all.yml     - ../../group\_vars/{{ ec2\_tag\_environment }}.yml     - ../../group\_vars/{{ ec2\_tag\_role }}.yml (where ec2\_tag\_environment and ec2\_tag\_role are facts provided by ec2.py that correspond to groups) Not only would that be annoying to have to copy/paste into each of these playbooks, but this doesn't quite seem to work. Variables loaded by vars\_files don't seem to go into hostvars for that host. I assume they are just globally scoped but I have other plays and included files that rely on things to be in hostvars and I'd rather not rewrite those just because the playbooks moved around (and sometimes they can't be changed because they are included in top-level playbooks too). I guess changing paths to files seems reasonable when moving things, but not the scope of variables. So, what am I doing wrong? Should I just have dozens (and in the future likely hundreds) or playbooks littered at the top level? Could ansible look for group\_vars in the CWD as well as the location of the playbook? Something else? Thanks, ---
**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5e9695/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan1](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan1)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2014, 11:52pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/playbook-organization-with-var-files/15684/2 "2014-07-16T23:52:46Z")
I’d consider using roles and just making your role path configurable, which would still make it easy to keep all your plays in whatever location you like. (You could even keep roles in different repos, etc) ---
**Author:** ![Michael\_Peters](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c2a13f/32.png) [@Michael\_Peters](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_Peters)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2014, 1:21pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/playbook-organization-with-var-files/15684/3 "2014-07-17T13:21:24Z")
I do use roles rather extensively for configuration management tasks. But for other (more orchestration related) tasks it doesn't seem to make much sense or at least I'm not seeing how best to organize that. For a more concrete example I have some mysql databases, some acting as master nodes some as read-only slaves. There is a mysql role and a mysql slave role that takes care of making sure the servers are provisioned and configured correctly. But I also have a playbook used when setting up (or resetting) replication between a master and a slave. This playbook uses some local actions, delegate\_to takes and some templates and variables from both of those other roles. So it doesn't really belong to either role and making it it's own role would involve duplicating the things it currently shares with those roles (for instance, roles can't share templates). But even turning all these orchestration playbooks into roles doesn't reduce the clutter at the top level since roles can't be executed by themselves. I'd still need lots of top-level playbooks that called these roles. And I'm not sure different repos really help that much either. I'm trying to keep things simple and reduce copy-paste. Having things in separate repos would increase the amount of things that need to be copied between those repos. A lot of these problems could be solved if ansible could look for group\_vars in the CWD. Would that cause other problems? ---
**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5e9695/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan1](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan1)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2014, 5:45pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/playbook-organization-with-var-files/15684/4 "2014-07-17T17:45:09Z")
I don’t feel the cwd should matter in most cases and it should not be significant. Ansible already looks for group\_vars relative to the playbook dir, so keeping your top level playbooks in the same directory is recommended. ---
**Author:** ![Michael\_Peters](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c2a13f/32.png) [@Michael\_Peters](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_Peters)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2014, 6:03pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/playbook-organization-with-var-files/15684/5 "2014-07-17T18:03:59Z")
> I don't feel the cwd should matter in most cases and it should not be > significant. But it does matter in some. I can't get playbooks that aren't in the same directory as group\_vars to behave like those that are. And there's nothing in the documentation that makes this obvious as to why or that says that using subdirectories to organize playbooks is a bad idea. > Ansible already looks for group\_vars relative to the playbook dir, so > keeping your top level playbooks in the same directory is recommended. Am I doing something wrong by having so many playbooks? This is a fairly smallish project with 20 roles, a site.yml, and 20+ other playbooks for orchestrating other common tasks. And that's not counting any of the multiple task files in roles that are included. That right there is getting close to 50 playbook files sitting at the top level if I did it that way. And this project is just getting started. Using the cwd as an extra path lookup seems like a pretty easy way to add this capability without any problems that I can see. ---
**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5e9695/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan1](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan1)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2014, 1:38am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/playbook-organization-with-var-files/15684/6 "2014-07-18T01:38:13Z")
“But it does matter in some. I can’t get playbooks that aren’t in the same directory as group\_vars to behave like those that are.” This is not because of cwd at all, but because of the playbook basedir. ---
**Author:** ![Michael\_Peters](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c2a13f/32.png) [@Michael\_Peters](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_Peters)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2014, 2:00pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/playbook-organization-with-var-files/15684/7 "2014-07-18T14:00:00Z")
You're right that the cwd isn't causing the difference in behavior. I was trying to point out that it seems weird that playbooks behave differently depending on where they are located. And these differences are more than just path differences. And that using the cwd in addition to the playbook basedir would remove these differences for lots of cases. But you're right that it wouldn't remove them for all cases because things could still not work if your cwd wasn't the same between executions. At the very least the docs should mention that you shouldn't put playbooks in subdirectories if that's an unsupported setup or at least mention what things won't work right if you do. ---
**Author:** ![Brian\_Coca1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/278dde/32.png) [@Brian\_Coca1](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Brian_Coca1)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2014, 2:23pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/playbook-organization-with-var-files/15684/8 "2014-07-18T14:23:01Z")
You want to change behavior from relative to playbook to relative to where you run them from? I find that less intuitive, having it relative to playbook gives you clear ‘packaging’, if I decide to run the playbook when I’m in /var/tmp and now it behaves differently, I would find that very confusing.​ ---
**Author:** ![Michael\_Peters](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c2a13f/32.png) [@Michael\_Peters](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_Peters)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2014, 2:40pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/playbook-organization-with-var-files/15684/9 "2014-07-18T14:40:17Z")
I don't want to change the current behavior, just add to it. This wouldn't stop using the playbook basedir as the primary place to look. But you're right, it would change the execution based on where you execute the command. But only if you were using the cwd feature. This wouldn't stop using the playbook basedir as the primary place to look. If there's a better way than I'm open to it. Maybe it's a flag that can be turned on per playbook? Or maybe a playbook can have a search\_paths parameter to list places to look. Or something else? All of this cwd discussion comes out of the fact that I'm trying to avoid having 50+ (now, likely closer to 100 later on) playbooks littering a single directory. If there's a better way, I'm open to it. ---
**Author:** ![Brian\_Coca1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/278dde/32.png) [@Brian\_Coca1](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Brian_Coca1)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2014, 2:46pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/playbook-organization-with-var-files/15684/10 "2014-07-18T14:46:32Z")
I have many more playbooks than that, I use subdirs and symlinks for common resource files and directories, I don’t see it as a big issue. I have also been consolidating many tings into roles, which simplifies the sharing.​ ---
**Author:** ![Michael\_Peters](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c2a13f/32.png) [@Michael\_Peters](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_Peters)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2014, 2:48pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/playbook-organization-with-var-files/15684/11 "2014-07-18T14:48:38Z")
So how do you solve loading group\_vars automatically? Or if you don't, how do you resolve the differences between how group\_vars are treated when automatically loaded vs loading them explicitly with vars\_files ? That's the issue that led me on this wild chase. ---
**Author:** ![Brian\_Coca1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/278dde/32.png) [@Brian\_Coca1](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Brian_Coca1)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2014, 2:51pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/playbook-organization-with-var-files/15684/12 "2014-07-18T14:51:57Z")
group\_vars are inventory related, vars\_files are play related, I’m not sure what the confusion or hardship comes from​. I do mostly use group\_vars relative to the inventory dir, not the plays.