Running remote playbooks within a play

[herby....@gmail.com]

Purely out of curiosity, what is the suggested course of action to run playbooks present on a remote host within a current run of a local Ansible play?

The worst case being to use the shell module to actually exec Ansible remotely with the remote playbook, are there more elegant approaches?

[Michael DeHaan]

Calling Ansible with Ansible?

There is no suggested course of action, but I suspect you would do exactly that.

I'd really want to understand the *why* though.

On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 1:32 PM, <herby....@gmail.com> wrote:

Purely out of curiosity, what is the suggested course of action to run playbooks present on a remote host within a current run of a local Ansible play?

The worst case being to use the shell module to actually exec Ansible remotely with the remote playbook, are there more elegant approaches?

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[herby....@gmail.com]

So let’s say you have the following situation:

• You have some sizable number of hosts, with some particular software that contains its own set of playbooks.
  
• There may be differences in the software versions, and thus playbooks can differ between sets of these remote hosts.
  
• You also have inventory and playbooks outside of these hosts, in your local environment.
  
• You want to run both the local and remote playbooks using the same (local) inventory.

In the situation where you don’t care about local inventory or context, I guess kicking off a remote execution of Ansible using the shell module or SSH would be an option.

But if you _did_ care about the current operating context, it would be interesting if Ansible were able to start a remote “slave” runner that would then run the remote playbooks/roles using the inventory and context delivered from your current local Ansible running instance (the parent/master).

The remote runner would run the remote plays with the host/inventory_hostname set to the remote host's, but at least you’d be able to share context such as facts, variables and inventory and be able to run plays/roles that exist on the remote side.  (Just an idea.)

[Michael DeHaan]

Yeah I'm not seeing where you need this yet.

Depends on the scale of your infrastructure, but plenty of very very large setups are not doing this -- and really, if you are in that area, treating cloud like cloud and using Ansible to build images is often a great option.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ansible-project/7a17c3e8-b323-4ab3-9694-b3b06d1ba837%40googlegroups.com.

[Erik Anderson]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 5:10 PM, Michael DeHaan <mic...@ansible.com> wrote:

Yeah I'm not seeing where you need this yet.

Depends on the scale of your infrastructure, but plenty of very very large setups are not doing this -- and really, if you are in that area, treating cloud like cloud and using Ansible to build images is often a great option.

Just to provide another perspective, we have a use case for running remote playbooks, and are doing this this via the shell module.

We really have two Ansible use cases - one is using Ansible in a "traditional" sense for provisioning servers, building images, etc. Our second use case is, I guess, a bit nonstandard. That being the configuration of on-premise server "appliances" installed in our customer's datacenters. We let customers provide configuration information - this gets saved to a local facts file, which is then used by a local playbook to apply the configuration. Sometimes this playbook is executed in a "standalone" fashion, independent of our centralized provisioning system, but sometimes it is executed remotely via another centralized playbook.

-Erik