Don't require the user to set variables for the FreeBSD group

[AnotherKamila]

Current state: the user must manually set variables in group_vars/freebsd

Wanted state: Add a detect_os_variables role to the site playbook. This role will have no tasks, but will autodetect and set these variables.

[evilham]

@drybjed: to me this sounds like debops.core. Am I wrong?

There are some debian specific things there, but it shouldn't be hard to make the equivalents for freebsd.

Would a "sub-role" be better? Sth like debops.core::freebsd.

Or maybe just bsdops.core that aims to be the same and is totally based on debops.core?

[AnotherKamila]

@evilham A role sounds good, and I think keeping it separate would be easier. bsdops.core sounds good to me! We need to talk :-P

[drybjed]

@evilham A replacement debops.core role included in the repository, in ansible/roles/ should override the one included in the DebOps repository; this is the same for any other role. You could also presumably create "dummy roles" that completely mask some roles, for example debops.ferm - of course some functionality like packet forwarding would have to be handled differently but that should be possible. The roles have to use the debops. prefix to override existing ones.

Unfortunately it seems that FreeBSD puts the configuration mainly in /usr/local/etc vs Debian's /etc, and this could affect most DebOps roles. Currently there's a mechanism for something like this in DebOps, which relies on ansible_local.root.* variables to define base paths, usually for /usr/local/lib, /srv and similar, but not for /etc. The ansible_local.root.etc fact could be used in roles to allow an override - the current default for Debian would have to be changed to /etc to make sense, but then it can be easily overriden via the core__root_etc variable in the inventory. After that all of the paths that put files in /etc would have to rely on this fact as the base, with something like:

- name: Generate template
  template:
    src: 'etc/app.conf.j2'
    dest: '{{ (ansible_local.root.etc
               if (ansible_local|d() and ansible_local.root|d() and
                   ansible_local.root.etc|d())
                else "/etc") + "/app.conf" }}'
    mode: '0644'

This would make things portable, but is essentially a mouthful if we want the role to work without debops.core applied on the host. I guess that's the price for portability. Alternatively that definition could be set in the role defaults to some variable, but that would have to be done for each role separately.

Or, there could be some general role, most likely only defining some variables, but included in all DebOps roles as a hard dependency, so that roles can use these variables without the need to check for their existence. This would solve the lack of global variables in Ansible, with a bit of overhead.

[evilham]

Great! Thank you! I'll lend a hand with this :-D and your input is very much appreciated as always.