- Published on
An Approach to Naming Ansible Tasks and Commands
- Authors
- Name
- Yair Mark
- @yairmark
I worked with a colleague recently who has worked extensively with Ansible. One thing I learnt from him is a good convention for naming ansible tasks:
- You name the task as normal but you number the tasks
This simple little convention makes it significantly easier to see at a glance what order the tasks run in without having to look inside main.yml
. For example, my tasks folder looks as follows:
tasks/
-> 1-base.yml
-> 2-setup-git-repo.yml
-> 3-setup-app.yml
-> main.yml
Another approach I have used is numbering the actions in the task file so it is easy to identify when running a task what file it is from and what step. For example in my 3-setup-app.yml
file I have named the commands as follows:
- name: 3.1 - Install app dependencies with pipenv
command: '{{ pip_env_bin_path }} install'
args:
chdir: '{{ git_root }}'
- name: 3.2 - Ansible copy '.env' file from host to remote server
copy:
src: '{{ path_to_env_file }}'
dest: '{{ git_root }}'
When this runs it is clear which task file's tasks are being run and easy to quickly go to the exact task command being run.