When building certain roles or playbooks, I often need to add a new directory to the global system-wide $PATH so automation tools, users, or scripts will be able to find other scripts or binaries they need to run. Just today I did this yet again for my geerlingguy.ruby Ansible role , and I thought I should document how I do it here—mostly so I have an easy searchable reference for it the next time I have to do this and want a copy-paste example!

    - name: Add another bin dir to system-wide $PATH.
      copy:
        dest: /etc/profile.d/custom-path.sh
        content: 'PATH=$PATH:{{ my_custom_path_var }}'

In this case, my_custom_path_var would refer to the path you want added to the system-wide $PATH . Now, on next login, you should see your custom path when you echo $PATH !