Using OpenStack-Ansible within your project¶

Including OpenStack-Ansible in your project¶

Including the openstack-ansible repository within another project can be done in several ways:

A git submodule pointed to a released tag.
A script to automatically perform a git checkout of OpenStack-Ansible.

When including OpenStack-Ansible in a project, consider using a parallel directory structure as shown in the ansible.cfg files section.

Also note that copying files into directories such as env.d or conf.d should be handled via some sort of script within the extension project.

Including OpenStack-Ansible with your Ansible structure¶

You can create your own playbook, variable, and role structure while still including the OpenStack-Ansible roles and libraries by setting environment variables or by adjusting /usr/local/bin/openstack-ansible.rc.

The relevant environment variables for OpenStack-Ansible are as follows:

ANSIBLE_LIBRARY: This variable should point to /etc/ansible/plugins/library. Doing so allows roles and playbooks to access OpenStack-Ansible’s included Ansible modules.
ANSIBLE_ROLES_PATH: This variable should point to /etc/ansible/roles by default. This allows Ansible to properly look up any OpenStack-Ansible roles that extension roles may reference.
ANSIBLE_INVENTORY: This variable should point to openstack-ansible/inventory/dynamic_inventory.py. With this setting, extensions have access to the same dynamic inventory that OpenStack-Ansible uses.

The paths to the openstack-ansible top level directory can be relative in this file.

Consider this directory structure:

my_project
|
|- custom_stuff
|  |
|  |- playbooks
|- openstack-ansible
|  |
|  |- playbooks

The environment variables set would use ../openstack-ansible/playbooks/<directory>.

Adding new or overriding roles in your OpenStack-Ansible installation¶

By default OpenStack-Ansible uses its ansible-role-requirements file to fetch the roles it requires for the installation process.

The roles will be fetched into the standard ANSIBLE_ROLES_PATH, which defaults to /etc/ansible/roles.

ANSIBLE_ROLE_FILE is an environment variable pointing to the location of a YAML file which ansible-galaxy can consume, specifying which roles to download and install. The default value for this is ansible-role-requirements.yml.

You can override the ansible-role-requirement file used by defining the environment variable ANSIBLE_ROLE_FILE before running the bootstrap-ansible.sh script.

It is now the responsibility of the deployer to maintain appropriate versions pins of the ansible roles if an upgrade is required.

Adding new collections in your OpenStack-Ansible installation¶

The Victoria release of openstack-ansible adds an optional new config file which defaults to /etc/openstack_deploy/user-collection-requirements.yml. It should be in the native format of the ansible-galaxy requirements file and can be used to add new collections to the deploy host. You can override location of the user-collection-requirements.yml by setting USER_COLLECTION_FILE environment variable before running the bootstrap-ansible.sh script.

Maintaining local forks of ansible roles¶

The Train release of openstack-ansible adds an optional new config file which defaults to /etc/openstack_deploy/user-role-requirements.yml. It is in the same format as ansible-role-requirements.yml and can be used to add new roles or selectively override existing ones. New roles listed in user-role-requirements.yml will be merged with those in ansible-role-requirements.yml, and roles with matching names will override those in ansible-role-requirements.yml. It is easy for a deployer to keep this file under their own version control and out of the openstack-ansible tree.

This allows a deployer to either add new ansible roles, or override the location or SHA of existing individual roles without replacing the original file entirely. It is also straightforward to include the

Using OpenStack-Ansible within your project