Playbooks In Subdirectories #12862

[Percy Grunwald]

I've decided to drop my two cents in here as well since I have spent the past hour trawling Google for advice about this issue and found nothing that I consider to be an acceptable solution.

In my opinion, Ansible's behavior when moving playbooks into a subdirectory (but still running them from the root directory) is unintuitive and doesn't seem to match how other programs work. I could enumerate all of the things that stop working, but I think it's sufficient to say that the expected behavior for the majority of people would be as follows:

Given that my directory structure is exactly the same as the layout shown in http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/playbooks_best_practices.html#directory-layout, and I am running my scripts from the Ansible root directory like:

```

cd /path/to/project/ansible

ansible-playbook site.yml

```

If I copy `site.yml` into any subdirectory of the Ansible root folder:

```

mkdir -p playbooks/subdir

cp site.yml playbooks

cp site.yml playbook/subdir

```

Then the following commands should all be **identical**:

```

ansible-playbook site.yml

ansible-playbook playbooks/site.yml

ansible-playbook playbooks/subdir/site.yml

```

In the 2+ years I have been using Ansible, I haven't encountered a situation where the current default behavior would have been beneficial compared to the behavior I outlined above. I feel like most people run their Ansible scripts from the Ansible root directory and mentally treat that as the directory that Ansible should be searching for vars/roles/inventory/etc, _especially_ since the `ansible.cfg` is located there.

It would be really great if there was a setting that would make Ansible behave in the way I have outlined. I would suggest a boolean variable called something like `lock_working_dir` or `lock_base_dir` that would "lock" Ansible to the `pwd` when searching for vars/roles/inventory/etc.

This would be a huge boon for organization. I'm happy to have a go at this if this is something that would get considered for PR.

[Varun Chopra]

> I feel like most people run their Ansible scripts from the Ansible root directory and mentally treat that as the directory that Ansible should be searching for vars/roles/inventory/etc, _especially_ since the `ansible.cfg` is located there.

Your last two years must've been bloody awful.

[Percy Grunwald]

Hi Varun,

What are you implying?