Tags

Ansible tags allow you to run only specific tasks in a playbook. This is useful if you want to run only a specific part of a playbook.

Apply tags to tasks

You can apply one or more tags to tasks in a playbook like this:

tasks:
- name: Task with tag1 and tag2
  ansible.builtin.debug:
    msg: "This task is tagged with 'test'"
  tags:
    - tag1
    - tag2

You can also apply tags to roles, playbooks and includes.

Running playbook with tags

By default ansible will run all tasks regardless of the tags. You can specify tags to run on the command line like this:

ansible-playbook playbook.yml --tag "tag1"

When you specify a tag on the command line, ansible will only run tasks that have that tag. These are other options for specifying tags on the command line:

--tags all               #run all tasks, ignore tags (default behavior)
--tags [tag1, tag2]      #run only tasks with either the tag tag1 or the tag tag2
--skip-tags [tag3, tag4] #run all tasks except those with either the tag tag3 or the tag tag4
--tags tagged            #run only tasks with at least one tag
--tags untagged          #run only tasks with no tags

Inheritance

Ansible does not inherit tags for the include_role and include_tasks modules. This means that you have to manually enforce inheritance like this:

- name: Apply the db tag to the include and to all tasks in db.yml
  include_tasks:
    file: db.yml
    # adds 'db' tag to tasks within db.yml
    apply:
      tags: db
  # adds 'db' tag to this 'include_tasks' itself
  tags: db

or you can create a block to apply the tag to all tasks in the block:

- block:
   - name: Include tasks from db.yml
     include_tasks: db.yml
  tags: db

Special tags

Always and Never are special tags that can be used to run tasks regardless of the tags specified on the command line.

tasks:
- name: Print a message
  ansible.builtin.debug:
    msg: "Always runs"
  tags:
  - always

- name: Print a message
  ansible.builtin.debug:
    msg: "Never runs"
  tags:
  - never

Reference

Tags - Ansible docs