Practical Ansible 2

Setting up role-based variables and dependencies

Variables are at the heart of making Ansible playbooks and roles reusable, as they allow the same code to be repurposed with slightly different values or configuration data. The Ansible role directory structure allows for role-specific variables to be declared in two locations. Although, at first, the difference between these two locations may not seem obvious, it is of fundamental importance.

Roles based variables can go in one of two locations:

• defaults/main.yml
• vars/main.yml

The difference between these two locations is their position in Ansible's variable order of precedence (https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/playbooks_variables.html#variable-precedence-where-should-i-put-a-variable ...