Tags

If you have a large playbook it may become useful to be able to run a specific part of the configuration without running the whole playbook.

Both plays and tasks support a “tags:” attribute for this reason.

Example:

tasks:

    - yum: name={{ item }} state=installed
      with_items:
         - httpd
         - memcached
      tags:
         - packages

    - template: src=templates/src.j2 dest=/etc/foo.conf
      tags:
         - configuration

If you wanted to just run the “configuration” and “packages” part of a very long playbook, you could do this:

ansible-playbook example.yml --tags "configuration,packages"

On the other hand, if you want to run a playbook without certain tasks, you could do this:

ansible-playbook example.yml --skip-tags "notification"

You may also apply tags to roles:

roles:
  - { role: webserver, port: 5000, tags: [ 'web', 'foo' ] }

And you may also tag basic include statements:

- include: foo.yml
  tags: [web,foo]

Both of these apply the specified tags to every task inside the included file or role, so that these tasks can be selectively run when the playbook is invoked with the corresponding tags.

tasks:

    - debug: msg="Always runs"
      tags:
        - always

    - debug: msg="runs when you use tag1"
      tags:
        - tag1