Use role vars

[markfaine]

Is there a way to have the ansible provider use the vars from the role's defaults/main.yml and vars/main.yml ?

[gardar]

Not exactly sure what you mean by provider, but if you are talking about using the vars from the role in the molecule playbooks (converge, cleanup, prepare, etc.) then you can include the vars from the role with vars_files
Something like this:

---
- name: Cleanup
  hosts: all
  vars_files: 
    - ../defaults/main.yml
    - ../vars/main.yml

[markfaine]

Sorry, provisioner, not provider.

Yes, but is that still necessary if I include a role, it seems that sometimes vars that are in the roles's vars/main.yml aren't available when the role is included from converge or prepare. I can't seem to figure out what the rules are for accessing role vars from molecule.

For example:

---
- name: Prepare
  hosts: all
  tasks:
    - name: Include mycollection.myrole
      ansible.builtin.include_role:
        name:  mycollection.myrole

The above should not complain about undefined variables that are defined in mycollection.myrole/vars/main.yml?

[gardar]

Where are you trying to use the vars from the role?
Could it be that you are trying to access the variables from the included role on the task level? AFAIK including a role does not bring the variables from that role into the task level, the vars from the role only affect the role itself.

[markfaine]

So to be especially clear, what you are saying is that the following would result in an undefined variable in the debug task of roleA:

# roleA/tasks/main.yml

- name: Include roleB
  ansible.builtin.include_role:
    name: roleB
  tags: always

- name: Debug roleB var
  ansible.builtin.debug:
    msg: "Value of role b variable is {{ roleBvar }}"

[gardar]

Yep that's correct, and you can actually test this with a basic ansible playbook (doesn't require molecule).

With that being said, you can use import_role instead of include_role which will make the vars from the role available to use in other tasks of the playbook.