Organize playbooks in subdirectories

[André]

Hi,
I am trying to find a suitable directory structure for my ansible files. I have come up with this structure which is not working with the playbooks in subdirectories:

.
├── group_vars
├── inventories
│   ├── production
│   │   ├── group_vars
│   │   │   └── all.yml
│   │   └── inventory
│   └── vagrant
│       ├── group_vars
│       │   └── all.yml
│       └── inventory
├── playbooks
│   ├── net1
│   │   └── dnsdhcp.yml
│   ├── net2
│   │   └── dnsdhcp.yml
│   └── update.yml
├── roles
│   ├── dnsmasq
│   ├── bind9
│   └── isc-dhcp
├── playbooks
└── Vagrantfile

In the group_vars for the inventories I have variables which differ between the real servers and my vagrant test vms (IP addresses, domain names), this is working fine.

Then I would like to organize the playbooks into subdirectories so I don't wind up with a directory with dozen of playbooks. The root group_vars variables would then define the project wide configuration which can be used by multiple playbooks.

For example if I have two subnetworks and I need a DHCP server on each (possible different programs), I would write a playbook for each which installs the server (using roles) and put them in different subdirectories.

Then I have the master file which includes most playbooks. This file could be used to run ansible every day with a cron job.

The problem is that the group_vars are relative to the current running playbook, so I can't run

ansible-playbook -i inventories/vagrant/inventory playbooks/net2/dnsdhcp.yml

One way would be to flatten out the hierarchy in the playbooks directory and put a symlink to the root group_vars directory in the playbooks directory:

.
├── group_vars
├── playbooks
│   └── group_vars -> ../group_vars
│   ├── net1-dnsdhcp.yml
│   ├── net2-dnsdhcp.yml
│   ├── update.yml


But then I would have to prefix the files for different subnets and would have one directory with many playbooks.



Is this a good way to organize the playbooks? I'm not sure if I understand the purpose of the playbooks correctly, am I putting the right plays in the playbooks or should I organize the plays in an other way into playbooks?