playbooks-and-roles

📘 Playbooks & Roles (Based on Your Project Structure)

Your Ansible project is well-organized using roles and playbooks. Below is a tailored explanation of how Playbooks and Roles work with examples taken directly from your directory structure.

---

📂 Project Structure Overview

D:\aops
├── playbooks/               # Main playbook files
│   └── report/
│       └── go-access/
├── roles/                   # All role logic here
│   ├── apache/
│   ├── goaccess-install/
│   ├── goaccess-report/
│   ├── nginx/
│   ├── node_exporter/
│   ├── promtail/
│   ├── report/
│   ├── ssh-key-reset/
│   ├── tailscale/
│   └── utilities/

---

🧠 What is a Playbook?

A playbook is a YAML file that tells Ansible what tasks to run and on which hosts. Think of it as the automation blueprint.

🧾 Example: playbooks/report/go-access/main.yml

---
- name: Generate GoAccess Report
  hosts: webservers
  become: true

  roles:
    - goaccess-install
    - goaccess-report

This playbook runs two roles on the webservers group: one to install GoAccess, and another to generate a report.

---

⚙️ What is a Role?

A role is a pre-defined structure for organizing related Ansible content like tasks, templates, handlers, etc.

📁 Role Example: roles/goaccess-report

roles/goaccess-report/
├── tasks/
│   └── main.yml
└── templates/
    └── goaccess.html.j2

🧾 tasks/main.yml

---
- name: Generate GoAccess HTML report
  command: >
    goaccess /var/log/nginx/access.log \
    -o /var/www/html/report.html \
    --log-format=COMBINED

📁 Role Example: roles/apache

roles/apache/
├── tasks/
│   └── main.yml
├── handlers/
│   └── main.yml

🧾 tasks/main.yml

---
- name: Install Apache
  apt:
    name: apache2
    state: present
  notify: Restart Apache

🔁 handlers/main.yml

---
- name: Restart Apache
  service:
    name: apache2
    state: restarted

---

🚀 Using Roles in a Playbook

- name: Install and configure Apache
  hosts: webservers
  become: true

  roles:
    - apache

This makes your automation clean, modular, and maintainable.

---

⚠️ Note on Nested Role Path

📁 roles/playbooks/roles/nginx/ — This looks like a nested role and may not work unless explicitly included. It's better to keep roles directly under roles/.

---

✅ Summary

Component	Purpose
Playbooks	Define orchestration and logic per host/group
Roles	Modular units (Apache, GoAccess, etc.)
Inventory	Defines target systems
Vars	Centralized variable management

📌 With this setup, you can easily scale automation by plugging roles into playbooks as needed. Clean, simple, and powerful!