I too deploy my whole setup using Ansible. Configuration files are not required to do so using Ansible. Ansible Revisited
Everything that you do through the UI gets saves as JSON text. Or if you want to, you can create tasks to push stuff using OH’s REST API, but that would be a lot of work. Just deploy the text created by interacting with OH through the UI. In my case I configuration control my OH config (and in OH 3 I’m 100% UI based) and my Ansible checks it out. But that is because I’m lazy and I don’t need more than that. You could of course write tasks to deploy each binding installation and create the Things, Items and Rules as separate tasks or roles if you wanted.
I’m not saying that you should do it this way too. But I don’t want others to think that it can’t be done this way too.