Deploy different environment variable configurations with the same docker image using combine in ansible 2.0

As described in an earlier post about improving performance in meteor applications, we separated synchedcron jobs out of a meteor application docker image using two deployments of the same image using a special environment variable.

In the ansible file below we can see two ansible docker tasks that both run a specific docker image. The environment settings are loaded from the app.env groupvar. Using the ansible combine functionthat was introduced in ansible 2.0, we are now able to combine the configured groupvars with one special environment variable CRON_ENABLED, which is set to 0 or 1, depending on wether we are deploying a cron instance, or a webserver instance of the same docker container. The ansible when configuration ensures that only one of these 2 tasks is ran for each individual server.

-   name: docker | start application
    docker:
    name: app
    image: "{{ docker.registry.organization }}/{{ docker.registry.project }}:{{ tag }}"
    username: "{{ docker.registry.username }}"
    email: "{{ docker.registry.email }}"
    password: "{{ docker.registry.password }}"
    state: reloaded
    restart_policy: always
    pull: always
    ports: - "{{ansible_eth1.ipv4.address}}:3000:3000"
    env: "{{ app.env|combine({'CRON_ENABLED': 0}) }}"
    when: "'appservers' in group_names"
    tags: app

-   name: docker | start application
    docker:
    name: app
    image: "{{ docker.registry.organization }}/{{ docker.registry.project }}:{{ tag }}"
    username: "{{ docker.registry.username }}"
    email: "{{ docker.registry.email }}"
    password: "{{ docker.registry.password }}"
    state: reloaded
    restart_policy: always
    pull: always
    ports: - "{{ansible_eth1.ipv4.address}}:3000:3000"
    env: "{{ app.env|combine({'CRON_ENABLED': 1}) }}"
    when: "'cronservers' in group_names"
    tags: app