Use roles with Ansible Galaxy

Ansible Galaxy provides roles maintained by the Ansible community and open-sourced. They can easily be installed and used in playbooks.

Install role globally

Let’s use an Apache role from Ansible Galaxy to install and configure our Apache server:

• Search for the Apache role in Ansible Galaxy maintained by geerlingguy
• Install the role on your machine
• Update your playbook.yml to use this role instead of our own apache role

Run your playbook and check everything is working. You should see a few more tasks being run - do not hesitate to visit the role’s source code to see how it’s done!

Override role’s default configuration

geerlingguy role’s configure Apache server to listen on port 80 by default. We want to listen on port 8080 instead:

• Update your playbook to listen on port 8080
  • Note: there are several possibilities here, as you remember Ansible variables can be configured in lots of place - find the place where it will override the role’s default in the best way!

Run your playbook and check everything is working. Your Apache server should be available on port 8080

Install role using requirements.yml

Create a requirements.yml file to define the role(s) and version we want to use. Install the roles using ansible-galaxy commands.

This setup is typically used on CI when testing our role to install all its dependencies. It’s much like a Python requirements.txt.

Use Galaxy role alongside our own role

We now have a role to manage our Apache installation, but what about our static website content?

Update our previous apache role:

• Only include the tasks required to copy our index.html file
• Delete old tasks used to install Apache as they are now managed by our Galaxy Apache role
• Change the variable apache_hello_message to Hello from static web [dev|prod]

Run your playbook and check everything is working.