Skip to main content

Ansible Tags

Here's a Markdown formatted tutorial on 'Ansible Tags'.

Introduction to Ansible Tags​

Tags in Ansible are a powerful feature that allows you to control the execution of your playbook tasks selectively. By assigning tags to tasks, you can choose to run only the tasks associated with specific tags when executing a playbook. This ability is extremely useful in managing large and complex playbooks.

Why Use Tags?​

Imagine you have a playbook with numerous tasks, and you only want to execute a small subset of those tasks. Without tags, you'd have to comment out the tasks you don't want to run, which can be tedious and error-prone. With tags, you can simply run the tasks associated with the tags you specify.

How to Use Tags​

You can assign tags to tasks using the tags keyword in your playbook. Here's an example:

---
- hosts: webserver
  tasks:
    - name: Install Apache
      yum:
        name: apache2
        state: present
      tags:
        - install

    - name: Start Apache
      service:
        name: apache2
        state: started
      tags:
        - start

In this playbook, the task "Install Apache" has been tagged with 'install', and the task "Start Apache" has been tagged with 'start'.

To run tasks associated with a specific tag, use the --tags command-line option followed by the tag name. For example, to run only tasks tagged with 'install', you would use the following command:

ansible-playbook playbook.yml --tags "install"

Using Multiple Tags​

You can assign multiple tags to a task and specify multiple tags when running a playbook. Here's an example:

---
- hosts: webserver
  tasks:
    - name: Install and start Apache
      yum:
        name: apache2
        state: present
      service:
        name: apache2
        state: started
      tags:
        - install
        - start

To run tasks associated with either the 'install' or 'start' tag, use the following command:

ansible-playbook playbook.yml --tags "install,start"

Special Tags​

Ansible also has two special tags: always and never. If you assign the always tag to a task, Ansible will always execute that task, even if you use the --tags or --skip-tags options. If you assign the never tag to a task, Ansible will never execute that task, even if you use the --tags option with the never tag.

Conclusion​

With Ansible tags, you have granular control over which tasks in your playbook to run. This feature is especially helpful when dealing with large playbooks. Happy tagging!

I hope this tutorial helps you understand the concept of Ansible tags and how to use them effectively in your Ansible playbooks.