Tags¶

Why This Exists¶

A large playbook shouldn't need editing just to run a subset of it during debugging or a partial deploy — tags give every task, block, or role a label that --tags/--skip-tags can filter on at run time.

What It Will Cover¶

• Applying tags: to a task, a block, and an entire role
• ansible-playbook site.yml --tags config,restart
• ansible-playbook site.yml --skip-tags slow_checks
• The special always and never tags
• ansible-playbook --list-tags to discover what a playbook supports without reading the whole file

Common Mistakes¶

• Tagging every task with the same tag, making --tags filtering meaningless.
• Forgetting that import_tasks resolves tags at parse time while include_tasks resolves them at run time — see Imports vs. Includes — which changes what --list-tags can see ahead of a run.

Interview Questions¶

• How would you run only a subset of a 200-task playbook without editing it?
• What do the always and never special tags do?

Next¶

Continue to Check Mode and Diff Mode.