Tags and Debugging

Part of the Ansible course

Your playbook started at six tasks and you ran it constantly. Now it is fifty tasks across four roles, it takes three minutes, and you are editing one nginx config line. Running the whole thing to test that one line is like rebuilding a house to repaint a door. Worse, when something does break on task 34, the output scrolls past and you are left guessing which variable was actually wrong.

Both problems have the same shape: you need to control how much of a playbook runs and how much it tells you while it runs. Ansible gives you tags for the first and verbosity plus the debug module for the second.