ansible: include role in a role?

Question

Is it possible to reuse a role in a role? I do not mean via defining a dependency in the meta/main.yml file of a role but by including the role in the tasks/mai

Answer 1

AFAIK, you can't. This is what dependencies are for.

If you want to avoid dependencies (because, for instance, you want 'role X' to run between two tasks), you can do this in the playbook itself if you think the tasks are related :

roles/webtier/tasks/main.yml:

- shell: echo 'hello'
- include: webtier.yml
- shell: echo 'role done'

All in all, it depends on what you're trying to do exactly. But in your example, 'still busy' seems to imply that the rolebooks/some_role is still running, which is not possible (there is no concurrency here).

Obviously, you can also sequence roles in a master playbook (which is probably what you do already) :

- name: Polite foo stuff
  hosts: foo_hosts
  roles:
    - say_hello
    - rolebooks/some_role
    - say_bye

- name: Unpolite foo stuff
  hosts: !foo_hosts
  roles:
    - rolebooks/some_role

Answer 2

Old question BUT for the record: use Ansible 2.2+ and you're good to go with include_role. Exactly for this very purpose... see documentation here.

Check out import_role as well... see documentation here

Answer 3

You can't, but you can do something kind of similar.

For a layout of:

roles/
    ...
    common/tasks/main.yml
    nginx/tasks/main.yml
    ...

In nginx/tasks/main.yml, you can call your common task:

- name: Call the 'common' role to do some general setup
  include: ../../common/tasks/main.yml

Note that because you're not using the typical import structure, you might run into some "weirdness" like role default variables not being accessible unless you included the role in the standard fashion earlier.