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- In this video, you will
learn about Ansible roles.

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So what is a role?

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Well, a role is a
community provided resource

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to make working with Ansible easier.

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They provide standardized
solutions for common tasks.

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The idea is very simple to understand.

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Let's say you want to use
Ansible to configure Docker.

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Do you really think

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that you are the first
person on the planet

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who wants to use Ansible
to configure Docker?

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Most likely not.

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That's where roles come in.

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From the community,

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different members of the
community create roles

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and they publish these
roles on Ansible Galaxy.

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And the nice thing is,

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you can fetch them from Ansible Galaxy,

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include them in your playbooks,

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and just use them as standardized code.

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And that allows you to focus on the things

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that need to be different
in your environment.

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That's what roles are all about.

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So, yeah, that's what I just said.

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Instead of finding out yourself,

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you can use community provided
roles in your playbook.

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And the only thing you need to do,

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is to add site-specific
configuration using variables

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and learn everything else from the roles.

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You can also work with customer roles

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where you create your own roles.

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That will be the next step.

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If you think that there is not
sufficient roles available,

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you can develop some for yourself.

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When you are working with roles,

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it's important to understand
task execution order.

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Tasks in roles are normally executed

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before other tasks in the playbook.

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If you want to change that behavior,

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you can you can use pre_tasks

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to execute tasks before the role.

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That is where you need to make sure

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that your system is updated,

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some configuration is started,

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firewall software is installed,

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or whatever task you need to take care of,

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and which is not taken
care of by the role.

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So if it isn't taken care of by the role

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and if it's important to happen

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before you run your
playbook, run pre_task.

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If your pre_tasks are using handlers,

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then handlers that are
triggered by pre_tasks

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are also executed before the roles.

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Let's go check out an example.

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So the roles example are in
the Git repository in roles.

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So what do we have?

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We have Nginx role,

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and in Nginx role, we are
using Geerlingguy.nginx.

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And this role is going to be
executed only on Ansible two.

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In fact, we can even make it more minimal.

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This is all that we need.

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So you need to tell where the
role needs to be executed,

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and you need to specify
the names of the roles

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that you want to execute.

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Notice that you can
include more than one role.

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So here, I'm using one role
only, which is pretty common.

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But if in the playbook you are creating

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a solution-based on multiple roles,

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you can include all of them right here

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in the order in which
you want to include them.

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There's one requirement though,

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and that is that, Geerlingguy
Nginx role is installed.

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I will tell you later how
you can easily find roles,

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but for now, Ansible
Galaxy minus minus help.

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I like using the minus minus help

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especially since the
Ansible Galaxy command

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has changed with the
appearance of the collection.

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There we can see there's a role

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and then using install Geerlingguy.nginx.

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So that is downloading the role

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that is developed by Mr. Geerling.

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Next, I can use Ansible Playbook

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just the way we used to do it

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on this Nginxrole.yml.

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So here we can see that Ansible Playbook

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Nginxrole.yml is working.

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So it is doing everything

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that it is requested to do in the role.

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That might take a minute
if there is no conflicts.

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Notice that because of the HTTPD,

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that we've been working with
throughout in this course,

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we might have an issue.

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If HTTPD is already listening on part 80,

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you're not going to be
able to work with Nginx

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but that's not an issue here.

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And that's an example
of how you can use roles

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in an easy way.

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Now let's go and investigate

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what is really happening
when you are using roles.