Pooling package installs in ansible

Question

I am trying to set up a system with multiple roles (e.g., webserver, database-server, mailserver etc.)

Each of the roles requires the installation of some software packages defined as their own task in the main.yml for each role.

Does ansible have a way to detect (or explicitly state it in a task) that in a certain play there will be multiple package installs and allow batching them together and skipping the later install steps?

No, and you probably don't actually want this either. It would make manual rollbacks (e.g. `yum history undo ...` more difficult or impossible, for instance. — Michael Hampton, Jul 12 '18 at 18:16

Vladimir Botka · Accepted Answer · 2018-07-12T17:58:44.110

1

An option would be to tag the installation tasks and install the packages as a 1st step:

ansible-playbook webserver.yml -t install_packages
ansible-playbook dbserver.yml -t install_packages
ansible-playbook mailserver.yml -t install_packages

Then run the plays:

ansible-playbook webserver.yml
ansible-playbook dbserver.yml
ansible-playbook mailserver.yml

If you want to speed-up the plays and conditionally skip the installations you might want to create and set a variable for this purpose (when: skip_install).

ansible-playbook -e skip_install=True ...

edited Jul 12 '18 at 17:58

answered Jul 12 '18 at 17:52

Vladimir Botka

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Since it is not a direct capability and as @Michael Hampton points out is probably not desirable, I'll acceppt this approximation as an answer – John Nemo Jul 22 '18 at 12:30

Pooling package installs in ansible

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