Tags are confusing

Archives Ansible Developer
1

My goal is to use a single tag to run specific roles independently but have dependent roles run as well with only the single tag.

My roles are in a playbook:

playbook.yml
roles:

role: roleA
tags: roleA ← for lack of a better name
role: roleB
tags: roleB
…

roles/roleA/meta/main.yml
…
dependencies:

  • { role: roleA, roleB }

What I want to do is run ansible-playbook … --tags roleA and have roleB run as a dependency every time before roleA runs.

How can I do this?

Thanks,
-Mark

2

Looks like I can’t edit posts here for some reason.

Correction:

dependencies:

  • { role: roleA, tags: roleA, roleB }

or at least that’s the way I want it to work.

The only purpose for this is to ensure that dependent roles for any of the tags I run also run. The only other option I can see is to add every single dependency as a tag to my dependent roles. Like this:

playbook.yml:
roles:
role: roleA
tags: roleA ← for lack of a better name
role: roleB
tags:

  • roleA
  • roleC
  • roleD
    … potentially very long list of tags

So I can then run any of the roles and know that roleB will always run. This however is very unwieldy and seems very unintuitive. There must be a better way.