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 have the function of tagging every single task inside the include statement.
See also