How to automatically install Ansible Galaxy roles?

All my Ansible playbooks/roles are checked in to my git repo.

However, for Ansible Galaxy roles I always have to explicitly download them one by one on every machine I want to run Ansible from.

It's even tough to know in advance exactly which Ansible Galaxy roles are needed until Ansible complains about a missing role at runtime.

How is one supposed to manage the Ansible Galaxy role dependencies? I would like to either have them checked into my git repo along with the rest of my ansible code or have them automatically be identified and downloaded when I run Ansible on a new machine.

Solution 1:

You should use a requirements.yml file for this use-case. Describe the roles you require, using any of a variety of install methods:

# Install a role from the Ansible Galaxy
- src: dfarrell07.opendaylight

# Install a role from GitHub
- name: opendaylight
  src: https://github.com/dfarrell07/ansible-opendaylight

# Install a role from a specific git branch
- name: opendaylight
  src: https://github.com/dfarrell07/ansible-opendaylight
  version: origin/master

# Install a role at a specific tag from GitHub
- name: opendaylight
  src: https://github.com/dfarrell07/ansible-opendaylight
  version: 1.0.0

# Install a role at a specific commit from GitHub
- name: opendaylight
  src: https://github.com/dfarrell07/ansible-opendaylight
  version: <commit hash>

Then install them:

ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml

Here's a working example (installing OpenDaylight using Ansible as a Vagrant provisioner). See the relevant Ansible docs for more info.

Solution 2:

As suggested, you can use ansible galaxy for this need.

Ansible has a feature where you can create a requirements.yml file that lists all of your roles. You can find out about that here: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/galaxy.html#installing-multiple-roles-from-a-file

For example (requirements.yml):

- src: yatesr.timezone

You then run ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml on this file to download all of the roles listed there.

If you would like to further automate it then, you can create a simple shell script that will run the two commands.

For example (ansible.sh):

./ansible.sh

ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml
ansible-playbook playbook.yml -i inventory