DEPRECATION WARNING

This Ansible role has been deprecated in favor of collection almaops.common.

almaops.vars

This role includes variables from specific directory.

Idea

While developing CI/CD for quite a big project, we found that it's very convenient to store variables in directories specific for each environment and then load them. Then we found that it's useful to split credentials and common variables into separate directories. The directories just have a structure like this:

.
├── common-vars
│   ├── project-A
│   │   └── dev
│   └── project-B
│       └── dev
├── credentials
│   ├── project-A
│   │   ├── dev
│   │   └── prod
│   └── project-B
│       ├── dev
│       └── prod
└── env-vars
    ├── project-A-env01
    ├── project-A-env02
    ├── project-A-prod
    ├── project-B-env01
    ├── project-B-env02
    └── project-B-prod

We put hosts from the same environment into one group (let's call it f.e. project-a-env01), and specify in the appropriate file under group_vars the directories to load variables from (like in example below).

The benefit of this approach is that the included variables always have the maximum priority (except of --extra-vars), so you've always got an understanding where to look for your environment paramters.

Role Variables

vars_root: here directories with environments are stored

vars_group: directory with environment variables, this path is relative to vars_root

vars_source: if specified, the role will load variables just from this directory

Role Defaults

vars_source: "{{ vars_root }}/{{ vars_group }}"

Example Playbook

This snippet will include all the *.yml files from playbook_dir/vars/dev:

- hosts: group-containing-all-hosts-for-dev-env
  roles:
    - role: almaops.vars
      vars_root: "{{ playbook_dir }}/vars"
      vars_group: "dev"

This snippet will include all the *.yml files from /home/user/my-env

- hosts: group-containing-all-hosts-for-dev-env
  roles:
    - role: almaops.vars
      vars_source: "/home/user/my-env"

This snippet will include all the *.yml files from: playbook_dir/creds/dev, playbook_dir/env-vars/dev, playbook_dir/common-vars/my-dev-env

--- playbook.yml ---
- hosts: group-containing-all-hosts-for-dev-env
  roles:
    # load credentials
    - role: almaops.vars
      vars_root: "{{ playbook_dir }}/creds"
      vars_group: "{{ credentials_library }}"
    # load variables specific for this environment group (group of similar environments)
    - role: almaops.vars
      vars_root: "{{ playbook_dir }}/common-vars"
      vars_group: "{{ env_group_name }}"
    # load environment specific variables
    - role: almaops.vars
      vars_root: "{{ playbook_dir }}/env-vars"
      vars_group: "{{ env_name }}"
      
--- group_vars/group-containing-all-hosts-for-dev-env.yml ---
credentials_library: "dev"
env_group_name: "dev"
env_name: "my-dev-env"

License

MIT