Ansible Tags

If you have a large playbook, it becomes useful to be able to run only a specific part of it rather than running everything in the playbook. Ansible supports a tag attribute for this reason.

When you apply tags on things, then you can control whether they are executed by adding command-line options.

When you execute a playbook, you can filter tasks based on the tags in two ways, such as:

1. On the command line, with the -tags or -skip-tags options.
2. In Ansible configuration settings, with the TAGS_RUN and TAGS_SKIP options.

In Ansible, tags can be applied to many structures, but its simplest use is with individual tasks. Let's see an example that tags two tasks with different tags, such as:

If you want to run the configuration and packages part of a very long playbook, then you can use the -tags option on the command line.

And if you want to run a playbook without certain tagged tasks, then you can use the -skip-tags command-line option.

Tag Reuse

We can apply the same tag to more than one task. By using the "--tags" command line options, all tasks with that tag name will be run.

For example: In below example, we use one tag "ntp" for several tasks, such as:

Special Tags

"always" is a unique tag that will always run a task, unless specifically skipped (--skip-tags always)

For example:

New in version 2.5

Here is another unique tag that is "never" which prevents a task from running unless a tag is specifically requested.

For example:

In the above example, the task will only run when the "never" or "debug" tag is explicitly requested.

Here are another three special keywords for tags:

"tagged" which run only tagged,

"untagged" which run only untagged, and

"all" which run all tasks respectively.

By default, Ansible runs as if "--tags" all had been specified.