Template file location best practice?

Archives Ansible Project
1

Where should I locate files that Ansible template steps need? My developers want to locate the files next to their Java code. I want the template files located in the Ansible source repository under the roles/name/templates directories. If we optimize for developers, then when I deploy, I’ll need to checkout both the Ansible code and any git repositories containing templates, which seems brittle. Say I have a tomcat application and I want to deliver property files and config files for my application. The developers want these files to live next to their java code, not next to the Ansible code.

A - Templates next to the code:

app1 (developers for app1 just work here)
±-- templates somewhere in the tree next to the java code

app2 (developers for app2 just work here)

±-- templates somewhere in the tree next to the java code

Ansible
roles
some-role-that-uses-templates
references app1 files via path

some-other-role-that-uses-templates
references app2 files via path

RESULT:

  • Developers like where templates are
  • Deployment process does not like where templates are. All 3 repositories have to be checked out to deploy.

B - Templates next to Ansible code:

app1

app2

Ansible
roles
some-role-that-uses-templates
templates for app1 here

some-other-role-that-uses-templates

templates for app2 here

RESULT:

  • Developers not happy because they have to edit two locations (app# + Ansible), and create two commits to modify code/deployment
  • Deployment process is simplified, only checkout Ansible repository.

Or is there some third better way of doing this that I’m not aware of?

Brian

2

symlinks? submodules? both would work transparent to both devs and the
deployment.

3

If we used symlinks, we would need a script to create them after checkout. This however would not work on windows. So symlinks won’t work for us.

Git submodules might be a possibility but every time I’ve read about them the resulting complexities seemed to outweigh the benefits.

4

git allows you to check in symlinks and preserves them on checkout