Getting rid of redundant Ansible roles

Question

I currently have a bunch of roles, like:

• apache2
• gcc
• gedit
• ...etc.

For each of those, I have a task file that looks like this:

---
- name: "Install {{ role_name }}"
  become: true
  package:
    name: "{{ role_name }}"
    state: present

Is there a way to abstract this to a higher level and have a single "Install package" role, and then somehow specify a bunch of specific packages to install per host in a variable or something?

Answer 1

Is this what you're looking for?

- hosts: all
  vars:
    bunch_of_specific_packages:
      - apache2
      - gcc
      - gedit
  tasks:
    - package:
        name: "{{ item }}"
      loop: "{{ bunch_of_specific_packages }}"

Answer 2

Another way to do this would be to set a role variable in your host_vars file called "role" and assign the role to install that way. You could also use the loop that Vladimir provided to install multiple roles.

tasks:
  - name: "Install Apache"
    become: true
    package:
      name: apache2
      state: latest
    when: role == "apache"

  - name: "Install GCC"
    become: true
    package:
      name: gcc
      state: latest
    when: role == "gcc"

You could also use tags to control what gets run in your play:

tasks:
  - name: "Install Apache"
    become: true
    package:
      name: apache2
      state: latest
    tags:
       - web
  - name: "Install GCC"
    become: true
    package:
      name: gcc
      state: latest
    tags:
       - gcc

And run your playbook setting the tags you require:

ansible-playbook example.yml --tags "web,gcc"