ansible-lint needs a recursive discovery mode

[ssbarnea]

Issue Type

• Feature request

Desired Behaviour

Currently ansible-lint cannot safely used like other linters which are able to look recursively inside the repository and lint whatever they find. Attempt to run ansible-lint . would result into a false-positive result, likely linting nothing if not playbook is present.

Once complex repository example can be seen at https://github.com/rdo-infra/ci-config/ as this exposes several important aspects:

• not all yaml files are Ansible related
• roles can be stored in multiple subdirectories: ci-scripts/container-push/roles,... and several others.
• playbooks can also be scattered around in multiple locations
• using exclude_paths can help but does not fix the inclusion part
• finding all .yaml files and passing them to ansible-lint (like pre-commit does by default) would confuse it because it may not be able to identify the nature of these files and may end-up trying to parse tasks or vars as playbooks.
• playbooks could be found inside roledir/molecule/*.yml with one notable exception: molecule.yml which is clearly not a playbook. I am not sure if we could just assume that the other files are playbooks or not.

While I do not mind making the assumption that roles are to found in folders with roles in their name, there is one signifiant exception: single-role repositories.

Before doing any work on this, we may need some help from Ansible team regarding on what information can and should be used to determine what is an Ansible playbook or role.

Desired outcome

If sorted correctly, newly added playbooks and roles should be linted without having to reconfigure the ansible-linter.

The user should be able to run ansible-lint without any arguments to lint the entire repository, just like flake8 and others are working.