include tasks from another role in ansible playbook

Question

I'm designing a kind of playbook lib with individual tasks

so in the usual roles repo, I have something like:

roles ├── common │   └── tasks │       ├── A.yml │       ├── B.yml │       ├── C.yml │       ├── D.yml │       ├── login.yml │       ├── logout.yml │       └── save.yml ├── custom_stuff_workflow │   └── tasks │       └── main.yml └── other_stuff_workflow     └── tasks         └── main.yml 

my main.yml in custom_stuff_workflow then contain something like:

---  - include: login.yml - include: A.yml - include: C.yml - include: save.yml - include: logout.yml 

and this one in the other workflow:

---  - include: login.yml - include: B.yml - include: A.yml - include: D.yml - include: save.yml - include: logout.yml 

I can't find a way to do it in a natural way: one way that worked was having all tasks in a single role and tagging the relevant tasks while including a custom_stuff_workflow

The problem I have with that is that tags cannot be set in the calling playbook: it's only to be set at command line as I'm distributing this ansible repo with many people in the company, I can't rely on command line invocations (it would be nice to have a #! header in yml to be processed by ansible-playbook command)

I could also copy the relevant tasks (inside common in the above tree) in each workflow, but I don't want to repeat them around

Can someone see a solution to achieve what I'd like without repeating the tasks over different roles?

I guess the corner stone of my problem is that I define tasks as individual and it looks not natural in ansible...

Thanks a lot

PS: note that the tasks in the workflow have to be done in specific order and the only natural steps to abstract would be the login and save/logout

PPS: I've seen this question How do I call a role from within another role in Ansible? but it does not solve my problem as it's invoking a full role and not a subset of the tasks in a role

Answer 1

Just incase someone else bumps into this, version 2.2 of Ansible now has include_role.You can now do something like this.

--- - name: do something   include_role:     name: common     tasks_from: login 

Check out the documentation here.