Generate Production-Ready Ansible Roles

This skill provides expertise in creating professional, production-ready Ansible roles following industry best practices - role structure, variable management, task organization, handlers, templates, and testing methodologies. Role structure and organization always follows the standard Ansible Galaxy layout: README.md, meta/main.yml, defaults/main.yml, vars/main.yml, tasks/main.yml, handlers/main.yml, templates/, files/, and a tests/ directory with inventory and test.yml.

Variable management best practices use clear, role-prefixed variable naming to avoid conflicts (e.g. myrole_service_name, myrole_packages, myrole_config), separating configuration from secrets and respecting proper variable precedence. Task organization and idempotency structure tasks logically: including OS-specific variables first, installing required packages via a looped package task with handler notification, creating a dedicated service user, deploying a Jinja2-templated configuration with backup and handler notifications, and ensuring the service is started/enabled via systemd - each task group tagged for selective execution. Handler implementation creates efficient handlers that avoid unnecessary restarts, including a config-validation handler that runs a test command and fails on non-zero exit before triggering a restart or reload handler.

Template best practices build maintainable Jinja2 templates with an ansible_managed header comment, conditional blocks (e.g. an SSL section rendered only when enabled), and loops over structured data (e.g. backend host lists with defaulted port/weight values). Meta-information and dependencies define detailed meta/main.yml galaxy_info (author, description, license, minimum Ansible version, supported platforms, galaxy tags) and role dependencies with their own variables. Testing and validation uses Molecule for role testing - a molecule.yml configuring the Docker driver, target platform image, and the Ansible provisioner/verifier. Error handling and debugging checks for existing installations via stat, conditionally logs debug information, and fails fast with a clear message on unsupported operating systems. Documentation standards call for a detailed README covering variables with types/defaults, dependencies, supported platforms, and example playbooks.

Use this skill when creating a new, reusable Ansible role intended for production use or Galaxy publication - one that needs standard structure, proper variable namespacing, idempotent tasks, and Molecule tests. It is well suited to roles that will be reused across multiple playbooks or shared publicly. It is not meant for a one-off playbook with no reuse intent - a simple inline playbook is sufficient there without the full role scaffolding.

Input: the service or application to be managed by the role, its configuration options, and target platforms.

Output: a complete Ansible role following the standard Galaxy directory structure, with tasks, handlers, templates, meta information, and Molecule tests. Example role-prefixed defaults:

# defaults/main.yml
myrole_service_name: "myapp"
myrole_service_port: 8080
myrole_packages:
  - name: "nginx"
    state: "present"

Follows the Ansible Galaxy role structure and is tested with Molecule using the Docker driver; it depends on and composes with other Galaxy roles via meta/main.yml dependencies.

DevOps and infrastructure engineers building reusable, production-ready Ansible roles, and teams publishing roles to Ansible Galaxy or an internal role library who need proper structure and Molecule test coverage.