In general, I stick all my shared roles in a single master folder that gets shared across all my projects. This avoids the tediousness of manual copy/pasting and updating multiple copies of the same role.

Than I modify each project's ansible.cfg to tell ansible to look for roles in that master folder in addition to the local project folder.

Sample ansible.cfg:

[defaults]
roles_path = ~/Code/ansible_roles 

Ansible first searches the local project for a role, then searches the roles_path. You can specify multiple paths by separating them with colons.

By default, ansible-galaxy install username.rolename will install the role to the roles_path configured in ansible.cfg, so that's pretty much all you need to do.

Occasionally I want to install the role into the specific project and not the master folder. For example, to avoid version conflicts when two roles have role dependencies that require different versions of the same role. In that case, you can use the -p ROLES_PATH or --roles-path=ROLES_PATH option:

ansible-galaxy install username.rolename -p ~/Code/project_deploy/ansible/roles/

In Ansible 1.9, you can manually specify where you want a role to be installed in your project's requirements.yml. Unfortunately, this path param was removed in Ansible 2:

# from galaxy
- src: jeffwidman.elasticsearch

# from private github repo, installing to a relative path
- src: https://github.com/jeffwidman/private_ansible_role
  path: vagrant/roles/

If you want to customize things further, there's an open issue to add support for multiple ansible.cfg files which would let you easily set roles_path at varying levels of specificity. Ansible will read ANSIBLE_CONFIG, ansible.cfg in the current working directory, .ansible.cfg in the home directory or /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg, whichever it finds first.

Here is how I solved the problem of dealing with galaxy roles and works for any platform.

Edit your ansible.cfg file, which should be part of your source control and add this to it:

roles_path = roles.galaxy:roles

Create a directory named roles.galaxy and from now on, when you do ansible-galaxy install xxx.yyy, it will install into roles.galaxy.

You will continue to keep your local roles inside the roles directory and the community ones in roles.galaxy. Both of them are supposed to be kept in your git repo.

Don't ever consider installing them on from galaxy, this would be a big security risk in addition to adding several additional points of failure.

I am probably answering this question too late. But what you want can be done with a single command:

ansible-galaxy install -p ./roles thefinn93.letsencrypt

will install the letsencrypt role to the roles directory and you don't need to copy things around.

To have your roles saved within your repository folder (which is what you likely want, having all your stuff version-controlled is one of the infrastructure-as-code), and assuming this is your directory layout:

repo-folder
    inventory     << likely you have this already
    roles         << this, too
    roles.galaxy  << create if you dont have it
    site.yml      << or whatever your playbook is called
    ansible.cfg   << repo-local config overriding gloabal ~/.ansible.cfg

Open the above shown ansible.cfg (or create it anew if you do not already have one), and add this content:

[defaults]
roles_path = roles.galaxy:roles

Running ansible-galaxy install SOMETHING will then save its contents within the roles.galaxy folder.

I desired a global path for my roles. You can do this my putting an ansible.cfg at ~/.ansible.cfg. A project based one will always take precedence.

cat ~/.ansible.cfg
[defaults]
roles_path = ~/.ansible/roles