The directory layout for roles

Roles are nothing but directories laid out in a specific manner. Roles follow predefined directory layout conventions and expect each component to be in the path meant for it.

The following is an example of a role, called Nginx:

Let's now look at the rules of the game and what each of the components in the preceding diagram is for:

Continuing our analogy, many popular movies have sequels and sometimes even prequels. In such cases, one should watch it in a particular order, as the storyline of a sequel depends on something that happened in the previous movie. Similarly, a role can have a dependency on another role. A very common example is, before installing Tomcat, Java should be present on the system. These dependencies are defined in the meta subdirectory of a role.

Let's get hands-on with this by creating a role for the Nginx application. Let's take a problem statement, try to solve it, and learn about roles in the process.

Consider the following scenario. With the onset of the soccer world cup, we need to create a web server to serve up a page on sports news.

Being a follower of agile methodologies, we will do this in phases. In the first phase, we will just install a web server and serve up a home page. Let's now break this down into the steps we need to take to achieve this:

Now that we have identified what steps to take, we also need to map them to the respective module types we will use to achieve each of these:

Before we start writing code, we will start creating a layout to organize our files.