best practices

Note for Tower/AWX users: Currently, Tower requires role and collection requirements to be split out into different files; see Tower: Ansible Galaxy Support. Hopefully Tower will be able to support the requirements layout I outline in this post soon!

Since collections will be a major new part of every Ansible user's experience in the coming months, I thought I'd write a little about what I consider an Ansible best practice: that is, always using project-relative collection and role paths, so you can have multiple independent Ansible projects that track their own dependencies according to the needs of the project.

Early on in my Ansible usage, I would use a global roles path, and install all the roles I used (whether private or on Ansible Galaxy) into that path, and I would rarely have a playbook or project-specific role or use a different playbook-local version of the role.