We have discussed, at many points in this book, that as your confidence and experience with Ansible grows, it is likely that your playbooks will grow in size, scale, and complexity. While this is undoubtedly a good thing, there may be times when you only want to run a subset of a playbook, rather than running it from beginning to end. We have discussed how to conditionally run tasks based on the value of a variable or fact, but is there a way we can run them on the basis of a selection made at the time that the playbook is run?
Tags in Ansible plays are the solution to this, and in this section we will build a simple playbook with two tasks—each bearing a different tag—to show you how tags work. We will work with the two simple host inventories that we worked with previously:
- Create the following simple playbook to perform two...