ansible: include role in a role?

Is it possible to reuse a role in a role? I do not mean via defining a dependency in the meta/main.yml file of a role but by including the role in the tasks/main.yml of another role directly?

For example, I define a couple of basic roles in rolebooks and some more high level roles in roles. I want the high level roles to include some of the basic roles in addition to some specific tasks.

playbooks/

  rolebooks/
    some_role/
      
  roles/
    webtier/
      tasks/
        main.yml

In playbooks/roles/webtier/tasks/main.yml:

    - shell: echo 'hello'
    - { role: rolebooks/some_role }
    - shell: echo 'still busy'

Thanks

Solution 1:

Old question BUT for the record: use Ansible 2.2+ and you're good to go with include_role. Exactly for this very purpose... see documentation here.

Check out import_role as well... see documentation here

Solution 2:

AFAIK, you can't. This is what dependencies are for.

If you want to avoid dependencies (because, for instance, you want 'role X' to run between two tasks), you can do this in the playbook itself if you think the tasks are related :

roles/webtier/tasks/main.yml:

- shell: echo 'hello'
- include: webtier.yml
- shell: echo 'role done'

All in all, it depends on what you're trying to do exactly. But in your example, 'still busy' seems to imply that the rolebooks/some_role is still running, which is not possible (there is no concurrency here).

Obviously, you can also sequence roles in a master playbook (which is probably what you do already) :

- name: Polite foo stuff
  hosts: foo_hosts
  roles:
    - say_hello
    - rolebooks/some_role
    - say_bye

- name: Unpolite foo stuff
  hosts: !foo_hosts
  roles:
    - rolebooks/some_role