Ansible Tags: Run Only Specific Tasks in a Playbook (Guide)

How to run only one task in an Ansible Playbook?

I'm going to show you a live Playbook with some simple Ansible code. I'm Luca Berton and welcome to today's episode of Ansible Pilot.

See also: Ansible Tags: Run Specific Tasks in Playbooks (Complete Guide)

How use tags statement in Ansible Playbook?

• --tags all • --tags tag1 • --tags [tag1, tag2] • --skip-tags [tag3, tag4] • --tags tagged • --tags untagged

Today we're talking about Ansible tags statement. When your Ansible Playbook starts to grow up it's useful to define tags to allow a more granular execution. You could define one or multiple tags at the individual task, include, import, play, block, role level. Tags also could have tag inheritance properties. The easiest way to run only one task in Ansible Playbook is using the tags statement parameter of the "ansible-playbook" command. The default behavior is to execute all the tags in your Playbook with --tags all. You could specify to execute a single tag with --tags tag1 or a list of tags --tags [tag1, tag2] You could specify also and use the negate logic to exclude some tags--skip-tags [tag3, tag4]. Another convenient way is to execute only the code with tag --tags tagged or without --tags untagged.

Links

• Tags

## Playbook How to run only one task in Ansible Playbook? I'm going to show you one simple Ansible Playbook with two tasks and two tags and how to select one or another via the command line.

code

---
- name: tags Playbook
  hosts: all
  gather_facts: false
  tasks:
    - name: example 1
      ansible.builtin.debug:
        msg: "example 1"
      tags: tag1
    - name: example 2
      ansible.builtin.debug:
        msg: "example 2"
      tags: tag2

execution default

$ ansible-playbook -i virtualmachines/demo/inventory variables/tags.yml
PLAY [tags Playbook] **********************************************************************************
TASK [example 1] **********************************************************************************
ok: [demo.example.com] => {
    "msg": "example 1"
}
TASK [example 2] **********************************************************************************
ok: [demo.example.com] => {
    "msg": "example 2"
}
PLAY RECAP ****************************************************************************************
demo.example.com           : ok=2    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0

execution tags tag1

$ ansible-playbook -i virtualmachines/demo/inventory --tags=tag1 variables/tags.yml
PLAY [tags Playbook] **********************************************************************************
TASK [example 1] **********************************************************************************
ok: [demo.example.com] => {
    "msg": "example 1"
}
PLAY RECAP ****************************************************************************************
demo.example.com           : ok=1    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0

execution tags tag2

$ ansible-playbook -i virtualmachines/demo/inventory --tags=tag2 variables/tags.yml
PLAY [tags Playbook] **********************************************************************************
TASK [example 2] **********************************************************************************
ok: [demo.example.com] => {
    "msg": "example 2"
}
PLAY RECAP ****************************************************************************************
demo.example.com           : ok=1    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0

execution tags tagged

$ ansible-playbook -i virtualmachines/demo/inventory --tags tagged variables/tags.yml
PLAY [tags Playbook] **********************************************************************************
TASK [example 1] **********************************************************************************
ok: [demo.example.com] => {
    "msg": "example 1"
}
TASK [example 2] **********************************************************************************
ok: [demo.example.com] => {
    "msg": "example 2"
}
PLAY RECAP ****************************************************************************************
demo.example.com           : ok=2    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0
execution tags untagged
$ ansible-playbook -i virtualmachines/demo/inventory --tags untagged variables/tags.yml
PLAY [tags Playbook] **********************************************************************************
PLAY RECAP ****************************************************************************************
execution tags all
$ ansible-playbook -i virtualmachines/demo/inventory --tags all variables/tags.yml
PLAY [tags Playbook] **********************************************************************************
TASK [example 1] **********************************************************************************
ok: [demo.example.com] => {
    "msg": "example 1"
}
TASK [example 2] **********************************************************************************
ok: [demo.example.com] => {
    "msg": "example 2"
}
PLAY RECAP ****************************************************************************************
demo.example.com           : ok=2    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0

code with ❤️ in GitHub

See also: Automate Redmine Installation on Ubuntu LTS 22.04 with Ansible

Conclusion

Now you know how to run only one task in Ansible Playbook from the command line.

Related Articles

• Ansible inventory groups and variables • what Ansible roles are and how to use them