Ansible is an incredible configuration management and provisioning utility that enables you to automate all the things. In this series, you’ll learn everything you need to know in order to use Ansible for your day-to-day administration duties. In video 10, we learn how to add tags to our plays that can make it easier to target specific things when we don’t want to run the entire playbook each time.

site.yml (with tags added)

 ---
 
 - hosts: all
   become: true
   pre_tasks:
 
   - name: install updates (CentOS)
     tags: always
     dnf:
       update_only: yes
       update_cache: yes
     when: ansible_distribution == "CentOS"
 
   - name: install updates (Ubuntu)
     tags: always
     apt:
       upgrade: dist
       update_cache: yes
     when: ansible_distribution == "Ubuntu"
 
 
 - hosts: web_servers
   become: true
   tasks:
 
   - name: install httpd package (CentOS)
     tags: apache,centos,httpd
     dnf:
       name:
         - httpd
         - php
       state: latest
     when: ansible_distribution == "CentOS"
 
   - name: install apache2 package (Ubuntu)
     tags: apache,apache2,ubuntu
     apt:
       name:
         - apache2
         - libapache2-mod-php
       state: latest
     when: ansible_distribution == "Ubuntu"
 
 - hosts: db_servers
   become: true
   tasks:
 
   - name: install mariadb server package (CentOS)
     tags: centos,db,mariadb
     dnf:
       name: mariadb
       state: latest
     when: ansible_distribution == "CentOS"
 
   - name: install mariadb server
     tags: db,mariadb,ubuntu
     apt:
       name: mariadb-server
       state: latest
     when: ansible_distribution == "Ubuntu"
 
 - hosts: file_servers
   tags: samba
   become: true
   tasks:
 
   - name: install samba package
     tags: samba
     package:
       name: samba
       state: latest

List the available tags in a playbook

ansible-playbook --list-tags site_with_tags.yml

Examples of running a playbook but targeting specific tags

 ansible-playbook --tags db --ask-become-pass site_with_tags.yml
 ansible-playbook --tags centos --ask-become-pass site_with_tags.yml
 ansible-playbook --tags apache --ask-become-pass site_with_tags.yml