Help understanding how the limit flag works with the ansible-playbook command

Archives Ansible Project
1

I ran into what seemed to me like a strange problem today, but I might just lack the understanding to know what was happening.
Let’s say you have a YAML file called ec2.yml to run against that looks like this:

`

2

limit filters the available host list, since both hosts have the host2
tag, it does not modify the list of hosts in the play.

it reads like this once resolved

- hosts: "tag_ansible_hosts1:&tag_ansible_host2"
...

- hosts: "tag_ansible_hosts2:&tag_ansible_hosts2"

It does not limit to an existing play declaration, but imposes
additional limits to those. What you seem to want is play tags.

- hosts: tag_ansible_host1
  tags:
    - host1
  roles:
     - role1
     - role2

- hosts: tag_ansible_host2
  tags:
    - host2
  roles:
     - role2

and then run ansible with -t 'host2'

3

Thanks so much Brian. That makes a lot of sense now.