Tailor ansible roles to environment

Question

I have a number of environments, that require a bunch of text files to be tailored in order for things like mule to speak to the right endpoints.

For this environment, this works:

ansible-playbook test03.yml

The only difference between an environment (from ansible's perspective) is the information held in ./roles/esb/vars/main.yml.

I've considered using svn to keep a vars/main.yml for each environment, so each time I need to configure an environment I check out roles and then vars/main.yml for that environment, before I run the command above.

To me, not an elegant solution. How can I do this better?

Directory structure

./test03.yml
./roles/esb/vars/main.yml
./roles/esb/tasks/main.yml
./roles/esb/templates/trp.properties.j2

./test03.yml

---
- hosts: test03-esb
  gather_facts: no
  roles:
    - esb

./roles/esb/vars/main.yml

---
  jndiProviderUrl: 'jnp://mqendpoint.company.com:1099'
  trp_endpoint_estask: 'http://tmfendpoint.company.com:8080/tmf/estask'
  trp_endpoint_builderQ: 'jnp://mqendpoint.company.com:1099'

./roles/esb/tasks/main.yml

---
  - name: replace variables in templates
    template: src=trp.properties.j2  dest=/path/to/mule/deploy/conf/trp.properties

./roles/esb/templates/trp.properties.j2

trp.endpoint.estask={{ trp_endpoint_estask }}
trp.endpoint.builderQ={{ trp_endpoint_builderQ }}

Answer 1

In order to use specific values for different environments all you need to do is move your variables from the role itself to a variables file for that specific enrivonment e.g.

production
|- group_vars
  |- servers
|- inventory
staging
|- group_vars
  |- servers
|- inventory
development
|- group_vars
  |- servers
|- inventory
roles
|- esb
  |- tasks
     |- main.yml
  |- templates
     |- trp.properties.j2
etc.

Inside each of the environments' group_vars/servers you could specify variable specific for that environment, e.g.

$ cat production/group_vars/servers
---
jndiProviderUrl: 'jnp://mqendpoint.company.com:1099'
trp_endpoint_estask: 'http://tmfendpoint.company.com:8080/tmf/estask'
trp_endpoint_builderQ: 'jnp://mqendpoint.company.com:1099'

$ cat staging/group_vars/servers
---
jndiProviderUrl: 'jnp://staging.mqendpoint.company.com:1099'
trp_endpoint_estask: 'http://staging.tmfendpoint.company.com:8080/tmf/estask'
trp_endpoint_builderQ: 'jnp://staging.mqendpoint.company.com:1099'

$ cat development/group_vars/servers
---
jndiProviderUrl: 'jnp://dev.mqendpoint.company.com:1099'
trp_endpoint_estask: 'http://dev.tmfendpoint.company.com:8080/tmf/estask'
trp_endpoint_builderQ: 'jnp://dev.mqendpoint.company.com:1099'

The Jinja2 template can then remain the same (it doesn't care where the variables come from after all).

You would then execute:

# Provision production
$ ansible-playbook $playbook -i production/inventory

# Provision staging
$ ansible-playbook $playbook -i staging/inventory

# Provision development
$ ansible-playbook $playbook -i development/inventory