Creating a site-wide playbook, nesting, and using include statements

As a best practice, we will create a top-level file, which will contain the blueprint of our complete infrastructure. Technically, we can include everything that we need to configure inside just one file. However, that would have two problems:

To avoid this problem, we will start organizing our code in a modular fashion, as follows:

The following diagram depicts the preceding steps in a very simple manner:

Here is our site.yml file:

---
# site.yml : This is a sitewide playbook
- include: www.yml

The preceding include directive assists us with modularizing the code. Instead of writing it all in one file, we split the logic and import what is required. In this case, we will include another playbook, which is called a nested playbook.

The following are some guidelines on what can be included and how: