Chapter 8: Simplifying Playbooks with Roles and Collections

Use roles and content collections to develop playbooks more quickly and reuse code.

What you will learn

• Describe the purpose of a role, its structure, and how roles are used in playbooks.
• Create a role in a playbook's project directory and run it as part of a play.
• Select and retrieve roles from external sources such as Git repositories or Ansible Galaxy, and use them in playbooks.
• Obtain a set of related roles, modules and other content from a content collection, and use them in a playbook.
• Write playbooks that use the system roles to perform standard operations.

Sections

1. Describing role structure
2. Creating roles
3. Exercise: Creating roles
4. Deploying roles from external content sources
5. Exercise: Deploying roles from external content sources
6. Getting roles and modules from collections
7. Exercise: Getting roles and modules from content collections
8. Reusing content with system roles
9. Exercise: Reusing content with system roles
10. Exercise: Simplifying playbooks with roles and content collections
11. Ansible roles and collections quiz
12. Ansible roles and collections cheat sheet