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Hooks

Hooks provide a mechanism for implementing cross-cutting concerns against multiple ansible repositories / playbooks / roles.

Tip

Hooks are analogous to JUnit's @Before,@After.. and Jasmine's beforeEach(),afterAll()

Hook Lifecycle

• before once hooks
• before each hooks
• group vaults
• ⇨ execute ⇦
• after each hooks
• after once hooks

Assuming group_names: all, web

• before.all.once.yml (run_once: true)
• before.web.once.yml (run_once: true)
• before.all.yml
• before.web.yml
• vault/all
• vault/web
• ⇨ execute ⇦
• after.all.yml
• after.web.yml
• after.web.once.yml (run_once: true)
• after.all.once.yml (run_once: true)

Before

Before hooks are useful enhancing or transforming the inventory model, e.g inject new containers into containers or updating docker_registry with temporary credentials.

before.all.once.yml vs before.all.yml

After

After hooks run after everything else and allows for the full use of ansible.

Hook Types

Tasks

Task hooks are imported using include: and just run the tasks listed in the yml file.

Vaults

Similar to vaulted files and variables included inside an inventory, Hook vaults are only imported on-demand, i.e. if you exclude tasks via --tags or hosts via --limit then a vault password is required. This allows running a subset of a playbook without access to the vault.

Hook Location

Hook files can placed inside the working directory and/or from any location specified by the hooks list.