Playbooks that depend on other playbooks?

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1

Hi all,

I’ve got a couple of playbooks that depend on other playbooks in order to eliminate as much repetition as possible. For example, one playbook is responsible for basic server configuration, which is a dependency of other playbooks whose goals are to deploy specific apps/services on top of this base configuration.

My current strategy looks something like this:

  • playbook b depends on playbook a
  • playbook b has playbook a as a git submodule in vendor/a
  • playbook b’s site.yml includes vendor/a/site.yml before playbook b’s roles are declared, in order to make sure that playbook a runs first

This sort of works, but it feels kind of janky. One of the biggest downsides to this is that sub-playbooks don’t have their group_vars evaluated — only the top-level playbook’s group_vars are evaluated. This effectively means that anything defined in group_vars in any of the sub-playbooks has to be copied up to the top-level playbook’s group_vars.

Is there a better way to handle this?

Thanks,
Cody

2

When you say depends, I assume you are meaning you are using playbook includes, so the provisioning playbook includes the “config” playbook?

3

That’s correct.

4

Thanks for clarification – it’s not a dependency then.

“One of the biggest downsides to this is that sub-playbooks don’t have their group_vars evaluated — only the top-level playbook’s group_vars are evaluated.”

I’m not processing this part of the email unfortunately, as group_vars/ is an inventory concept.