Ansible with VMware – tag examples – Part 11

Tags are essentially labels or keywords that can help identify and organize the running of your playbooks. So if your are going to install a program in a section in your playbook you can give it a tag which can be any name to identify it. Then you can run the playbook with –tags. Tags can be named anything but you should add a tag to identify what that part of the playbook is doing.

Below is a example

sudo nano tags-install.yml

---
- hosts: webservers
  become: true
  tasks:
  - name: install apache2 on Ubuntu
    tags: always
    apt:
      name: apache2
      state: latest
    when: ansible_distribution == 'Ubuntu'

- hosts: fileservers
  become: true
  tasks:
  - name: install samba on Centos
    tags: samba,fileserver
    dnf:
      name: samba
      state: latest
    when: ansible_distribution == 'CentOS'

- hosts: dbservers
  become: true
  tasks:
  - name: install vlc and apache2 Ubuntu
    apt:
      name:
        - vlc
        - apache2
      state: latest
    when: ansible_distribution == 'Ubuntu'

My inventory.ini file looks like this

[fileservers]
#centos
192.168.1.151
#Ubuntu
[webservers]
#ubuntu
192.168.1.128
[dbservers]
#ubuntu
192.168.1.130
[workstations]
#centos
192.168.1.150

Here we have three examples, in one tag: always means it will always run, ‘samba’ and ‘fileserver’ tags either can be used or both too, last one doesn’t have tag so it will be skipped if I use a tag in my playbook command.

ansible-playbook --list-tags tags-install.yml
ansible-playbook --tags fileserver tags-install.yml --ask-become-pass
ansible-playbook --tags "fileserver,samba" tags-install.yml --ask-become-pass

My outputs

It ignored the 192.168.1.130 which is a dbserver which in my playbook doesn’t have a tag.

This playbook I ran with two tags, but didn’t do anything because everything is already installed.

Below is the screen shot from the servers targeted (managed nodes) First command show it was NOT installed, then after the playbook ran it installed.

commands
#ubuntu
sudo apt list --installed | grep apache2
#centos
sudo dnf list --installed | grep samba