common-roles

Common roles that are intended to be shared (reused) across multiple Ansible playbooks/roles.

Use

To use these common roles in another GitHub repository, simply add this repository as a (git) submodule of that repository. This can be accomplished by running a command that looks something like the following:

$ git submodule add https://github.com/Datanexus/common-roles common-roles

This will create a common-roles subdirectory, then clone this repository into that common-roles subdirecory and checkout the latest commit from this repository, and create a .gitmodules file that looks something like the following:

[submodule "common-roles"]
	path = common-roles
	url = https://github.com/Datanexus/common-roles

Once the common-roles repository has been added as a submodule, the next step is to add the common-roles directory to the roles_path used by Ansible. This can be accomplished by creating an ansible.cfg file in the same directory as the playbook that will be run that looks something like this:

[defaults]
roles_path = ../:common-roles

With the submodule added and the roles_path modified to ensure that the roles in this repository are included in the roles_path used by the ansible-playbook command, the roles in this repository can then be used in any playbooks that might be defined in the repository that this common-roles repository is being added to as a submodule.

To commit the changes made by the process of adding this repository as a submodule, you would then run a series of commands that look something like this:

$ git add common-roles ansible.cfg
    ...
$ git commit -m "adding common-roles submodule to repository"
    ...
$ git push
    ...

Cloning the resulting repository

To clone the resulting repository, simply add a --recursive flag to the git clone command that you would normally use. For example, the following command will clone the dn-solr repository from the Datanexus organization at GitHub.com (which includes this repository as a submodule):

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/Datanexus/dn-solr

Pulling changes into the resulting repository

If this repository is modified and the developer of a repository that includes this one as a submodule wants to pull the latest changes into their repository, they can do that quite easily by using a sequence of commands that look something like this:

$ cd common-roles
$ git checkout master
    ...
$ git pull
$ cd ..
$ git add common-roles
    ...
$ git commit -m "updating common-roles submodule version"
    ...
$ git push
    ...

This sequence of commands will pull down the latest changes from the https://github.com/Datanexus/common-roles repository, update the version of the common-roles submodule that is used by the repository that depends on it, and commit that new version to that repository.