Help organizing project and accessing paths

[Synaesthete]

I'm working on a small Ansible project that's a little outside its primary use-case. I'm automating the generation of new web projects in a Mac OS X dev environment. There are two objectives:

1.) Install all development tools on the local machine

2.) Compose various projects based on small component roles/tasks

As a simple example, if you run the main playbook, it will prompt you for a project folder, install Sublime Text, NodeJS, etc., and set up all the basic files needed to begin working on a new project. Here's a subset of my project folder:

ansible-generator
  |- main.yml <-- Main playbook
  |- apps
     |- nodejs
        |- tasks,vars,defaults,etc.
     |- sublime
  |- scaffolds
     |- git
     |- node
     |- vagrant
  |- install
     |- dmg.yml

Everything under both apps and scaffolds are roles. 'apps' install local dev tools, and 'scaffolds' uses templates to set up and modify new project files (package.json, Vagrantfile, .gitignore, etc.)

I have a couple questions:

1.) Could this entire project be turned in to a role itself and be distributed on Ansible Galaxy, given its different project layout and different use-case? Since this is a project built using lots of small sub-roles, how could I run all those dependent roles from tasks/main.yml?

2.) The roles in the /apps folder need to reference tasks under the /install folder. Right now I have to use relative paths like "../../../dmg.yml". I'd rather set up a variable further up and just use "{{ installers }}/dmg.yml", but without just setting this variable to "../../.." What's the best way to get the absolute path to the root of this project? The playbook_dir variable always returns "."

3.) Any other thoughts on organizing my project? Is it reasonable to have roles in both /apps and /scaffolds or does this seem unwieldy compared to putting everything under a /roles folder?

Thanks! If you'd like to take a closer look at my project you can find it here: https://github.com/rvangundy/ansible-generator

[Michael DeHaan]

This may be a useful resource for organization tips:

http://docs.ansible.com/playbooks_best_practices.html

Also, if you haven't seen it already, the ansible-galaxy CLI can be used to quickly stub out a role with the "init" command.

You may wish to read about role dependencies, however galaxy is not meant as a way to distribute top level playbooks - in practice, they are seldom reusable because nobody wants  to install the exact same infrastructure (you've already made a lot of choices about Sublime and Node), whereas roles provide a more ideal chunk of reuse.

As for your directory questions try, "{{ playbookdir }}/some_path".

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[Synaesthete]

Thanks for the response.

I'm using the following task:

- debug: msg="{{ playbook_dir }}"

With this output...

ok: [localhost] => {
    "msg": "."
}

So it's returning a relative path. I get this same output regardless of where I run the debug task, so this doesn't help me point to my project root if I use the playbook_dir variable in one of my roles or some other subdirectory. Incidentally, inventory_dir returns an absolute path (e.g. /etc/ansible), though the inventory directory isn't what I'm after.

[Michael DeHaan]

What is "ansible --version" ?

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[Synaesthete]

ansible 1.7

[Michael DeHaan]

Ok - got it.

Sounds like a path just needs to be os.path.abspath'd somewhere.

If your 1.7 checkout is up to date, please file a github ticket so we can take a look.

Thanks!

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[Synaesthete]

Done.

https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/8317