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"

Tag Inheritance

You can apply tags to more than tasks, but they ONLY affect the tasks themselves. Applying tags anywhere else is just a convenience so you don’t have to write it on every task:

- hosts: all
  tags:
    - bar
  tasks:
    ...

- hosts: all
  tags: ['foo']
  tasks:
    ...

You may also apply tags to roles:

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

And include statements:

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

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

Special Tags

There is a special ‘always’ tag that will always run a task, unless specifically skipped (–skip-tags always)

Example:

tasks:

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

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

There are another 3 special keywords for tags, ‘tagged’, ‘untagged’ and ‘all’, which run only tagged, only untagged and all tasks respectively.

By default ansible runs as if ‘–tags all’ had been specified.