Ansible shared files between roles

My solution was to create roles for the common stuff and add them as dependencies.

For example, your playbook would look like this

play.yml
roles/
  common-1/
    files/
      common-1
  common-2/
    files/
      common-2
  web/
    meta/
      common-1
      common-2
    tasks/
    files/
      other-multiple-files
  role-2/
    meta/
      common-1
      common-2
    tasks/
    files/
      other-multiple-files
  role-3/
    meta/
      common-2
    tasks/
  role-4/
    meta/
      common-1
    tasks/

so, roles/common-1 and roles/common-2 are roles that just deploy the files, and all the roles that need those, they have it as a dependency in the meta/ folder.

You've got two reasonably decent approaches you can try here to reduce repetition.

You could have a separate shared-files directory that sits as a sibling to your role folders like this:

play.yml
roles/
  web/
    tasks/
    files/
      other-multiple-files
  role-2/
    tasks/
    files/
      other-multiple-files
  role-3/
    tasks/
  role-4/
    tasks/
  shared-files/
    common-1
    common-2

You would then reference this in the tasks with a relative file location from where the role/files folder would be:

- name: copy common-1
  copy:
    src: ../../common-1
    dest: /path/to/dest/common-1

- name: copy role specific file
    src: other-multiple-files
    dest: /path/to/dest/other-multiple-files

Or alternatively to use a relative path to the folder, you could symlink things across like this:

play.yml
roles/
  web/
    tasks/
    files/
      common-1 -> ../../common-1
      common-2 -> ../../common-2
      other-multiple-files
  role-2/
    tasks/
    files/
      common-1 -> ../../common-1
      common-2 -> ../../common-2
      other-multiple-files
  role-3/
    tasks/
    files/
      common-2 -> ../../common-2
  role-4/
    tasks/
    files/
      common-1 -> ../../common-1
  shared-files/
    common-1
    common-2

And you can then reference the file as if it was in the role/files directory directly:

- name: copy common-1
  copy:
    src: common-1
    dest: /path/to/dest/common-1

- name: copy role specific file
    src: other-multiple-files
    dest: /path/to/dest/other-multiple-files