Ansible Tags

In this lesson, you will first learn how to execute tasks in an Ansible playbook by specifying a single tag. Then, you will learn how to run tasks with multiple tags. We'll use a playbook named tags-test.yml for these examples, which includes three different tasks, each tagged differently.

Understanding Tags in Ansible

Before diving into the examples, let's briefly explain what a tag is in Ansible. Tags are identifiers assigned to tasks within a playbook, allowing for selective execution of these tasks. When you run a playbook, you can specify one or more tags, and only the tasks that have those tags will be executed. This is particularly useful for running a subset of tasks in a large playbook.

Playbook Example: "tags-test.yml"

Let's create a new playbook named tag-test.yml:

Here's our sample playbook tags-test.yml, which includes three tasks with unique tags:

Executing a Single Tag

To run tasks associated with a specific tag, use the ansible-playbook command with the --tags option followed by the tag name. For example, to execute only the task tagged as configure, the command would be:

This command ensures that only the task with the configure tag gets executed. Tasks tagged with install or restart will be skipped.

Executing Multiple Tags

You can also specify multiple…