Hey Jack,
The entire mission of Ansible is "simple IT automation", right? :) Wherever
> possible, my preference would be for a single Ansible playbook to handle
> the execution of a single high-level "goal"/"user request". If that isn't
> the case, then one needs to somehow bundle those externally, typically in a
> script. That requires the local "Ansible team" to decide on and maintain
> knowledge in such a scripting language, and requires implementing error
> checking and possibly error recovery in the scripting language. Sure.. it
> isn't strictly necessary, but I would rather just call a script
> "restart_system.bash" that makes a call to a single ansible playbook
> instead of seeing the bash script make a call to 6 ansible playbooks. What
> happens if the playbooks need to pass state or other data between each
> other? Much cleaner if it occurs in a single call, no?
>
Sorry, I think I misunderstood your intent here. I definitely agree with a
single playbook for a single high level user request. I jumped to the
conclusion that you wanted to encode a bunch of different user requests in
a single playbook.
<snip>
> I wrote some test roles to verify what you described would work:
>
>> ansible$ find roles/{web,app1,app2} -type f | sort
>> roles/app1/startServer/tasks/main.yml
>> roles/app1/stopServer/tasks/main.yml
>> roles/app2/startServer/tasks/main.yml
>> roles/app2/stopServer/tasks/main.yml
>> roles/web/startMaintenance/tasks/main.yml
>> roles/web/startServer/tasks/main.yml
>> roles/web/stopMaintenance/tasks/main.yml
>> roles/web/stopServer/tasks/main.yml
>>
> All of those files have what amounts to the the following code:
>
>> ansible$ cat roles/web/startMaintenance/tasks/main.yml
>> ---
>> - name: Run first task for startMaintenance
>> debug: msg="Doing first task"
>> - name: Run second task for startMaintenance
>> debug: msg="Doing second task"
>>
> Each role gets a playbook for testing and when separate execution happens
> to be needed:
>
>> ansible$ find playbooks/test/ -type f | grep -v restart | sort
>> playbooks/test/app1_startServer.yml
>> playbooks/test/app1_stopServer.yml
>> playbooks/test/app2_startServer.yml
>> playbooks/test/app2_stopServer.yml
>> playbooks/test/web_startMaintenance.yml
>> playbooks/test/web_stopMaintenance.yml
>>
> Each of those has some trivial, essentially identical code:
>
>> ansible$ cat playbooks/test/web_startMaintenance.yml
>> ---
>> - hosts: 127.0.0.1 # Imagine 'web'
>> connection: local
>>
>> roles:
>> - web/startMaintenance
>>
> Finally.. the restart playbook:
>
>> ansible$ find playbooks/test/ -type f | grep restart
>> playbooks/test/restart_system.yml
>> ansible$ cat playbooks/test/restart_system.yml
>> ---
>> - include: web_startMaintenance.yml
>> - include: app1_stopServer.yml
>> - include: app2_stopServer.yml
>> - include: app2_startServer.yml
>> - include: app1_startServer.yml
>> - include: web_stopMaintenance.yml
>>
> Is there something about the way restart_system.yml is written above that
> makes it "not Ansible-style" or that should be expected to lead to
> problems? Thanks again.
>
>
I would probably structure this a little bit differently, going back a
little bit on what I said above about a single playbook per user request.
This might actually be a really good use case for tags.
playbooks/test/restart_system.yml:
---
- hosts: 127.0.0.1
connection: local
roles:
- { role: web/startMaintenance, tags: ['web'] }
- { role: app1/stopServer, tags: ['app1'] }
- { role: app2/stopServer, tags: ['app2'] }
- { role: app1/startServer, tags: ['app1'] }
- { role: app2/startServer, tags: ['app2'] }
- { role: web/stopMaintenance, tags: ['web'] }
Now you can invoke it with:
ansible-playbook restart_system.yml --tags app1
...to only restart app1, or without tags to restart everything. (Maybe the
web start/stop should be untagged, so it runs every time--not sure. Depends
on your app.)
This way you lose the intermediary playbooks, and end up with a single
playbook to do all of your restart tasks.
If app1 and app2 roles are really close together, maybe you could
parameterize them, too:
- { role: genericApp/stopServer, appName: "app1", tags: ["app1"] }
-Tim
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