Should playbooks be able to limit the tags called in a role they load?

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So I apparently was going the wrong route with my thoughts on how tags in roles and playbooks interacted. I was thinking that when you referenced the tags when bringing in the role you were limiting the role, not tagging it inside the playbook.

In my head what this enabled was the ability to have a very config management oriented role that could cover all facets of whatever the role was related to, preferably laid out in such a way that the end state of running an non-limited manner ended with everything installed, configured, and running.

Then with the same role you would then be able to modularly utilize specifically related tasks in the role based on tags, which benefits related orchestration playbooks. This specifically appeals to me for the purpose of having ready to run playbooks to hand off to our dev and ops teams.

Its now obvious to me that I was thinking about this wrong[1] and the second I actually tried to use it this way it all fell apart. I have two roles[2][3] that are setup with tags to support this methodology, and isolating them in a playbook and using the tag restrictions of the cli, this works.

I’ve got an example of what I was originally doing wrong, and what I’m proposing as a thought of role/tag behavior inside playbooks in a gist[4].

In the playbook there is some functionality thats not in upstream yet, but there is an associated PR[5] for it.

I feel this is a reasonable use case, but is there a better way for me to accomplish the same thing? Would there be interest in supporting this feature? (I’m open to working on it if I can find the time.

thanks

greg

[1] re-reading the related documentation was a slap in the face, because the associated text is rather obvious about the behavior.
[2] https://github.com/gregswift/ansible-plight
[3] https://github.com/kost/ansible-galaxy.ubuntu.puppet
[4] https://gist.github.com/gregswift/a1c72dfd70f6736b6748
[5] https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/7260

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This is about the ninth time this has been asked in the last few weeks :slight_smile: … I am guessing nobody reads the other posts :slight_smile:

There’s been a bit of a proposal for a new keyword “use_tags”, which I’m not against, if reasonably minimal.

Might be a PR already.

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I did skim through the extensive PR list looking for one, and didn’t find it, but could quite easily have missed it. Is there a good way to search PRs? There are 59 issues with ‘tags role’ when searching. I only noticed one similar, and it is the use_tags one[1].

I’ll conceed that I did not search the group, i hadn’t even actually joined until i submitted this so thats my bad. I did find this thread on with_tags [2], but it also seems to have a negative response, and by the end they took different routes that seem to me to be more convoluted (having to add when statements and define variables… basically ‘tags light’ imo).

What would you define as reasonably minimal?

-greg

[1] https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/8231
[2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/ansible-project/tags$20role/ansible-project/hSR8CVcxHwE/XO59ewUgWSoJ

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Ok it was someone filing an RFE, not a PR - good catch.

yes, code would be welcome.

The “use_tags” thing was what I had proposed in the thread.