Feature request: support for relative copying from inventories folder

[mat013]

Feature Idea

COMPONENT NAME

Ansible

SUMMARY

In the best practice section of the ansible documentation
http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/playbooks_best_practices.html#alternative-directory-layout

it is suggested that the organisation of files are split by each inventory that one makes in this case per environment. It gives the advantage that anything, which is relevant for that particular environment are organised together. Currently only values are supported. I would like to propose an extension/enhancement to this idea, which is to be able to place files which are only relevant to a particular environment. e.g. SSL certificates.

And then it should be possible for the copy task to locate to the files by referring relative.

In the following example when using the copy task and referring relative to the webserver role, then searching for the file will only be carried out in the roles/webserver/files tasks. My proposal is that assuming the inventory is the inventories/production/hosts then when referring relative in a copy task for the webserver role should look in inventories/production/roles/webserver/files as well, and it should have higher precedence than roles/webserver/files

+-- inventories
  +-- production
       +-- hosts
       +-- roles
            +-- webserver
                  +-- files
                       + certificate.pem
   +-- development
       +-- hosts
       +-- roles
            +-- webserver
                  +-- files
                       + certificate.pem
+-- roles
     +-- webserver
          +-- tasks
               + ...

The motivation behind this proposal is:

• it seems to be more consistent with the philosophy of this how to organise the files in alternative directory layout
• it would provide a cleaner organisation when one has decided to use this philosophy rather than have to place environment specific files into roles/webserver/files/production/certificate.pem and use some logic to resolve it to a particular environment
• It would also be possible to restrict some of the inventories in case that only some part of an organisation should be allowed. e.g. production should only be allowed by operations team.

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[jborean93]

@mat013 you are probably going to be better off adding this proposal to the next Ansible meeting and talking about it there ansible/community#296.

[mat013]

Thanks. I will look at it when I am back from vacation.

[bcoca]

We voted in irc meeting and decided to decline the proposal

[mat013]

I found a workaround for the issue which is to add a variable in the group_vars/all file

e.g.:

files_resources: "{{ inventory_dir + '/roles/' + role_name + 'files' }}"

And then prefix where ever the filepath is needed

e.g.

{{ lookup_file('file', files_resource + '/...