How to automatically install Ansible Galaxy roles?

Question

All my Ansible playbooks/roles are checked in to my git repo.

However, for Ansible Galaxy roles I always have to explicitly download them one by one on every machine

Answer 1

You could use an Ansible role to install the needed roles using the command module.

Here is a very basic example that runs ansible-galaxy install:

- name: Install roles from Ansible Galaxy
  command: ansible-galaxy install {{ item.item }}
  with_items:
    - "{{ ansible_roles_list }}"

The ansible_roles_list may be supplied as a variable or as a role parameter.

If you do this in a role, it has to be applied before any other roles that you want to install using it, in a separate playbook. This is because Ansible checks the if all the roles are available before running the playbook where you reference them.