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by wilsaj 4591 days ago
Haven't used the web gui, so can't comment on it. The core open source ansible product is text-based. A few months ago, I migrated a provision and deploy system from a bundle of fabric and shell scripts to ansible. I'm happy with the results.

Some things are easier to do: builtin templating for things like config files is nice and all the modules I've used work as advertised. Some things are harder: reusing groups of similar tasks is kind of awkward but doable. The main advantage is that the ansible imposes a structure that is necessarily self-descriptive and that makes everything very readable. The docs are great and the learning curve is pretty linear so you can defer messing with advanced features until you need them (at that point you'll probably be happy they exist).
1 comments
mpdehaan2 4591 days ago
wilsaj, have you looked at parametered roles yet? http://www.ansibleworks.com/docs/playbooks_roles.html#roles

Curious on thoughts about what we could make easier.

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alepper 4591 days ago
I don't want to hijack this thread, but I've found parameterized roles fit my use case perfectly. However, a couple related things caught me out earlier tonight: both the apt_key 'file' parameter, and 'with_file' seem to ignore the roles search paths. I have an apt role which handles installing the package keys, adding and updating repositories, and installing a list of packages. Passing e.g. 'nginx.key' from the nginx role wouldn't work, as they looked only in roles/apt/tasks rather than roles/*/files as I expected. Passing a full path worked. (If I remember correctly! I'm a little hazy on the exact details now, although if this isn't as expected I can do some legwork tomorrow and raise a bug.)

Thanks very much!

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mpdehaan2 4591 days ago
yeah shoot the list an email on this. All the lookup plugins should use the roles search path already, but it could be that one got missed. I'd probably want to see a snippet of the playbook to understand a little better too. Thanks!
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wilsaj 4591 days ago
Hi mpdehaan. I hadn't seen parametered roles - maybe I just overlooked them. I did use a lot of parameterized includes but roles would be more flexible. Thanks for the heads up.
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