CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ansibleansible-role
Bob
Bob

Reputation: 8504

Ansible roles YAML error

Testing a basic Ansible roles setup but got an error on the first line of a role main.yml, I am sure it's something silly though

play.yml

- hosts: myhosts
  remote_user: myuser
  roles:
    - test

Directory structure

play.yml
roles/test/tasks/main.yml

main.yml

- hosts: all
  user: myuser
  gather_facts: no
  tasks:
  - name: ping all hosts
    ping:

When I run ansible-playbook play.yml, I get the error

The offending line appears to be:


- hosts: all
  ^ here

It looks like a simple YAML parse error but if I run ansible-playbook main.yml, it works fine, so not sure what's going on. Any thoughts?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2260

Answers (1)

Steve E.
Steve E.

Reputation: 9353

You cannot specify hosts in roles/test/tasks/main.yml. The hosts are specified in the play.yml file.

roles/test/tasks/main.yml is used to define the actions you want Ansible to perform. In your case to ping hosts, it could simply look like:

 ---

 - ping:

This will perform the ping action on the hosts specified in your play.yml

Ansible has a set folder structure it can use to break down playbooks. The play.yml file, specifies which hosts to target and what roles to apply along with other top level controls.

Individual roles specified in the play.yml file are located in roles/X/, there is a certain folder structure that Ansible expects. It will look for tasks to run in the test role here roles/test/tasks/main.yml.

play.yml is just one playbook. You can create many in the same folder and call them with ansible-playbook.

The official documentation has a more detailed example of the recommended playbook directory structure

Upvotes: 2

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