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DevOps / Ansible Interview questions

Explain the purpose of tags in Ansible playbooks?

Tags let you label individual tasks, roles, or blocks so you can selectively run or skip parts of a playbook at execution time, instead of always running everything from top to bottom.

tasks:
  - name: Install packages
    ansible.builtin.package:
      name: nginx
    tags: [install]
  - name: Deploy configuration
    ansible.builtin.template:
      src: nginx.conf.j2
      dest: /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
    tags: [config]


ansible-playbook site.yml --tags config
ansible-playbook site.yml --skip-tags install

This is useful during iterative development or troubleshooting, where re-running an entire playbook (including slow steps like package installation) just to test a configuration change wastes time. Two special tags, always and never, give extra control: tasks tagged always run regardless of which tags were requested, and tasks tagged never are skipped unless explicitly requested by name.

What do tags let you do at execution time?
Which special tag makes a task run regardless of the requested tags?

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