I'm working in a company with a big code base with multiples products,
We use Ansible for our products deployments.
We have multiples shared roles and specific roles per product.
Each shared role is versioning and tagged,
Let's imagine product X in version 1.0.0 and a product Y in version 1.1.0 and 2 shared roles A & B
X has a dependency on role A/B in version 1.0.0
Y has a dependency on role A in version 1.0.0 and role B in version 1.5.0
I'm working on my product X for a new major release 1.1.0
So I'm working too in Ansible to add multiples config files, remove some others, update the shared role A
But my version 1.0.0 is still in production, so it may require some adjustments for bugs. and It may need to update the ansible too.
Now is my problem.
When I release X:1.1.0 with the updated ansible, my playbooks are no more compatible with the 1.0.0 branch.
What's a good practice for handling ansible with a product life
It is good to have a role and tasks per version ?
tasks
- main.yml
- 1.0.0.yml
- 1.1.0.yml
cat main.yml
---
include_tasks: {{product_version}}.yml
include_tasks: 1.1.0.yml
when : product_version >= 1.1.0
and in each version file contains the diff with the previous one ?
but for the 1.10.0, it will become a nightmare...
Do you have any experience for these uses cases ?
First, we must assume that all roles are in their own git repositories. (If they are not, fix that first.) Also, the playbook that will do the installation is also in its own repository, along with a file called roles/requirements.yml. (That is where Ansible Tower expects it to be.)
A particular version of the installation playbook repo will have a particular roles/requirements.yml file which will specify exactly what versions of what roles are needed to run that version of the playbook.
So, for product X, we have a roles/requirements.yml file that says,
- name: A
src: git@gitlab.company.com:mygroup/A.git
scm: git
version: 1.0.0
- name: B
src: git@gitlab.company.com:mygroup/B.git
scm: git
version: 1.0.0
And for product Y, we have a roles/requirements.yml file that says,
- name: A
src: git@gitlab.company.com:mygroup/A.git
scm: git
version: 1.0.0
- name: B
src: git@gitlab.company.com:mygroup/B.git
scm: git
version: 1.5.0