# roles and non-relative dirs **URL:** \ **Category:** Ansible Project\ **Created:** [June 12, 2013, 5:30pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/roles-and-non-relative-dirs/12951 "2013-06-12T17:30:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Seth\_Vidal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/7ba0ec/32.png) [@Seth\_Vidal](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Seth_Vidal)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2013, 5:30pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/roles-and-non-relative-dirs/12951/1 "2013-06-12T17:30:02Z")
Our structure is such that I want to refer to roles in non-relative dirs. A canonical absolute path: for files, tasks, etc I defined a global vars file that I load that has $files and $tasks etc, defined. I wanted to do the same thing with $roles so I could do roles: - $roles/somerole and it would just work no matter what. the problem is vars\_files are loaded after \_load\_roles() is run - so the vars aren't there. If the vars imported from a role are supposed to be trumped by the vars\_files in the playbook, that all makes sense - but isn't it possible to pull in \_some\_ way of defining a global var/path for roles? After looking at \_load\_roles() I thought I could just define an ansible.cfg variable of a roles path so that it would search that path (if defined) after using the relative path first, perhaps. Would that be an acceptable patch? Thanks -sv ---
**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/da6949/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan2](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan2)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2013, 8:35pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/roles-and-non-relative-dirs/12951/2 "2013-06-12T20:35:08Z")
Right, roles are automation that add things to vars\_files and elsewhere, so they happen first. In this case, I think you could be happy with a “-e roles=path/to/roles” I kind of like the idea of being able to set -e variables in ansible.cfg, so yes, this would be quite welcome!