The default and custom role paths

By default, Ansible looks inside the roles/ subdirectory of the project that we create playbooks for. Being top-class devops engineers, we will follow the best practice to have a centralized, version-controlled repository to store all your roles. We may also end up reusing the roles created by community. Once we do this, we can reuse these roles across multiple projects. In such cases, we will check out the code at one or more locations, for example:

For nondefault paths, we will need to add the roles_path parameter to ansible.cfg as shown in the following command:

roles_path = /deploy/ansible/roles:/deploy/ansible/community/roles

Parameterizing the roles

At times, we may need to override default parameters specified inside vars or the default directory of a role, for example, running web servers on port 8080 instead of 80. In such cases, we can also pass parameters to roles in the preceding playbook, as follows:

---
#www.yml : playbook for web servers
- hosts: www
  roles:
- { role: nginx, port: 8080 }