Ansible Roles : Basics & How to Combine Them With Playbooks

Ansible roles provide a well-defined framework and structure for setting tasks, variables, handlers, metadata, templates, and other files. They enable reuse and sharing of Ansible code efficiently, improving collaboration and velocity as different users can work on separate roles in parallel without modifying the same playbooks simultaneously. The standard role directory structure includes defaults, files, handlers, meta, tasks, templates, tests, vars, and library directories. Roles can be created by refactoring Ansible playbooks into a role or generated from scratch using the ansible-galaxy init command. They can be used in plays with the roles option at the play level or at the task level with include_role dynamically and import_role statically. Sharing roles is possible through Ansible Galaxy, an online open-source public repository of Ansible content.