Best Practices and Advanced Patterns

As your Ansible automation grows, following best practices becomes essential for maintainability, security, and scalability. This lesson covers recommended patterns, Ansible Vault, collections, and CI/CD integration.

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Recommended Directory Layout

The official Ansible best practices suggest the following project structure:

production/               # Production inventory
staging/                  # Staging inventory
group_vars/
+-- all.yml               # Variables for all hosts
+-- webservers.yml        # Variables for webservers
+-- dbservers.yml         # Variables for dbservers
host_vars/
+-- web1.example.com.yml  # Host-specific variables
roles/
+-- common/               # Base role for all servers
+-- nginx/                # Web server role
+-- postgresql/           # Database role
+-- monitoring/           # Monitoring agent role
playbooks/
+-- site.yml              # Master playbook
+-- webservers.yml        # Web server playbook
+-- dbservers.yml         # Database playbook
ansible.cfg               # Project configuration
requirements.yml          # Role and collection dependencies

The Master Playbook (site.yml)

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- import_playbook: playbooks/webservers.yml
- import_playbook: playbooks/dbservers.yml

This lets you run the entire infrastructure with one command:

ansible-playbook -i production site.yml

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Idempotency

The most important principle in Ansible automation:

Every task should be safe to run multiple times without changing the result.

Idempotent vs Non-Idempotent