We have covered all the essential Ansible topics on our site. Now in this article, let us learn what are ansible roles and how to use Ansible roles to create a structured project and distribute them. Next we will move on to discuss the advantages of using ansible roles over standard playbooks. Finally, we will see how to create Ansible roles and different methods to import roles in the playbook.

Ansible roles offer a directory structure where you can break down complex playbooks into small and manageable chunks. The main advantage of using ansible roles is given below:

In the upcoming sections, I will show you how to create a simple ansible role and different ways to use roles in the playbook.

Use the ansible-galaxy command to initiate the role. Here, I named my role as sample-role.

Under the sample-role directory, you will have different directories to organize your playbooks.

Let’s go over each directory to understand its purpose.

If you look at the above image, one common file under some of the directories is main.yml. You should not try to rename this file since ansible will look out for the related object under the main.yml file.

As part of your role, only the tasks directory is mandatory and all other directories can be skipped.

I am going to create a project which will install a couple of tools for my Ubuntu desktop. First, I will create ansible.cfg file and the inventory file.

Created the playbook with a single task to install terminal tools.

Below is the output for the above task. This is the standard way of creating a playbook in ansible.

Now let's create a role and organize the task inside the role. I am not using the ansible-galaxy command to initialize the role, instead I am manually creating the task directory which is the only directory required for my role.

Here my role is named "tools" and the tasks directory along with the main.yml file is created.

Now move the task under the tasks/main.yml file.

In the main playbook, you have to tell ansible to use the roles to run the task. There are a couple of ways to achieve this.

You can use the roles keyword and give the role name as input.

Ansible will treat the roles defined at play level as static import and will be parsed when parsing the playbook.

You can run the playbook with verbose to see from where the task is automatically picked from.

You can add more than one rule under the roles section.

You can also apply other ansible directives like vars, and tags. For example, if you apply tags at the role level they will be inherited by all the tasks under the role.

You can import the roles into the playbook statically and dynamically using the import_roles and include_roles directives.

Both the import_role and include_role have similar syntax. The main difference is import* directives are processed during playbook parsing and include* directive is processed only in the order they are defined and run the task dynamically.

Now you should have a fair understanding of how to structure a role. When you create playbooks that involve variables, handlers, and files then you have to create an appropriate directory and group the tasks.

Ansible has it’s method to find the role location and run the tasks. If ansible is not able to locate the role, then the following error will be thrown.

Take a look at the above error message. It shows a couple of directories where ansible will search for the role.

The first and last directory path is automatically added by ansible based on the directory from which you ran the playbook.

If you have stored the roles in a different location, then you can set the path using "roles_path" in ansible.cfg file.

In this article, we have seen what are ansible roles and the advantages of using ansible roles over standard playbooks. And then we discussed how to create Ansible roles and different ways to import ansible roles in the playbook. Finally, we have seen how ansible finds the roles using the roles_path and how to add the custom path to the roles_path directive.