Incorrect role name in sample playbooks

[jaketothepast]

Describe the bug

When using the role name provided in sample playbooks, running ansible-playbook fails because the role is not found.

jacob@pop-os:~/work/vasi-infrastructure$ ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini playbooks/setup-backend-server.yml 

PLAY [my first play] **********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

TASK [Gathering Facts] ********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [redacted]

TASK [Ping my hosts] **********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [redacted]

TASK [Print message] **********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [redacted] => {
    "msg": "Hello world"
}

TASK [Install Nginx] **********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
ERROR! the role 'ansible-role-nginx' was not found in /home/jacob/work/vasi-infrastructure/playbooks/roles:/home/jacob/.ansible/roles:/usr/share/ansible/roles:/etc/ansible/roles:/home/jacob/work/vasi-infrastructure/playbooks

The error appears to be in '/home/jacob/work/vasi-infrastructure/playbooks/setup-backend-server.yml': line 13, column 15, but may
be elsewhere in the file depending on the exact syntax problem.

The offending line appears to be:

     ansible.builtin.include_role:
        name: ansible-role-nginx
              ^ here

To reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Install role from Ansible Galaxy, fresh install of ansible core.
   • Install collections via requirements.yml file.

2. Run sample playbook

   - Name: my first play
   hosts: backend
   tasks:
   - name: Ping my hosts
    ansible.builtin.ping:
   
   - name: Print message
    ansible.builtin.debug:
     msg: Hello world
   
   - name: Install Nginx
    ansible.builtin.include_role:
       name: ansible-role-nginx
    vars:
       nginx_branch: stable

3. See error

Expected behavior

I was able to install nginx using the role name nginxinc.nginx instead. Verified that this is what Ansible expected by manually checking my ~/.ansible/roles directory.

Your environment

• Version of the Ansible NGINX role or specific commit: 0.24.1
• Version of Ansible: 9.2.0
• Version of Jinja2 (if you are using any templating capability)
• Target deployment platform: Ubuntu 23.10

[alessfg]

Thanks for opening an issue @jaketothepast! This one is tricky since while I can see why it could be a bug, it's also a "feature" 😂

The tl;dr is that the sample playbooks are also the playbooks used during the Molecule CI/CD pipeline. During local testing, using nginxinc.nginx as the role name can cause some issues where depending on your local Ansible settings, the role might get cached and thus new changes will not get properly tested. At the same time, if you were to pull this role from git instead of Ansible Galaxy, you would also need to use ansible-role-nginx as the role name instead of nginxinc.nginx. Yet if you download the role from Ansible Galaxy, you will need to use nginxinc.nginx as the role name, like you correctly identified.

I don't know that there's a way to appropriately fix this in the code, but at minimum I think I can add a note to the README and sample playbooks advising against using one role name or the other.