We use AAP to deploy roles. The roles are in Git. I now have 2 roles that need to deploy the same files and templates, and of course I don’t want to keep 2 versions in Git. How could I solve that?
Is it possible that the files and templates could (should?) be part of separate role that you perhaps pull in as dependency?
The other pattern I saw out there was that the file/template wasn’t part of the roles, but was instead provided by playbook that is using the roles. So file was in repository with playbook and template/file path was passed to role as parameter.
As an alternative to what @mea_rah proposed, you can also push your files in a git repository that you can clone/pull on your remote hosts (or locally, then copied / templated out, if needed) from a separate task, which can be in or out (via include_tasks or import_tasks modules) of your roles. Or if all target hosts have access to a shared storage, you can directly copy files from there, depending on your needs.
I still think having your files and deploy task on a separate role used as a dependency for your other roles is the way to go, though I’d need more context to give you a more appropriate answer.
Symlinks are the simplest solution (just checked, it works)
$ tree test-role* test-role1 ├── tasks │ └── main.yml └── templates └── template1.j2 test-role2 ├── tasks │ └── main.yml └── templates └── template1.j2 -> ../../test-role1/templates/template1.j2 $ cat test-role1/tasks/main.yml - name: copy template tags: test-role1 become: yes template: src: template1.j2 dest: /root/template1 $ cat test-role2/tasks/main.yml - name: copy template tags: test-role2 become: yes template: src: template1.j2 dest: /root/template1 $ ansible-playbook playbook.yml --diff --check --tags test-role2 ... TASK [test-role2 : copy template] ***************** --- before +++ after: /home/deploy/.ansible/tmp/ansible-local-143602q8imzfz/tmp8g6dn_h1/template1.j2 @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +this is a template
