Passing variable as tags to ansible roles does not work

Question

I pass a variable ACTION to site.yml as below.

ansible-playbook -v -i  sslhost.txt -e "APP_NAME=ssl-perf ACTION=renewal, gen_cert"  site.yml

My site.yml has ansible role called "manager" to which i m passing ACTION variable as tags. See below.

more site.yml
- hosts: "{{APP_NAME}}"
  user: "{{USER}}"
  roles:
   - { role: manager, APPLICATION_NAME: "{{ APP_NAME }}", tags: [ '{{ ACTION }}' ]  }

The manager role's tasks/main.yml looks like this

more manager/tasks/main.yml
---
# tasks file for manager

- include: manager_pull.yml
  tags: renewal
- include: manager_gen.yml
  tags: gen_request
- include: manager_gencert.yml
  tags: gen_cert
- include: manager_push.yml
  tags: install

I was expecting only manager_pull.yml and manager_gencert.yml to be included in the roles but the output shows that all the include in the manager role gets included / invoked.

My ansible version is: 2.1.0.0

Can you please explain why am i not able to pass ACTION variable as tags to ansible role ?

Alternatively can anyone also tell me if and how would it be possible to pass tags instead of ACTION variable to the site.yml and get this to work ?

kfreezy kfreezy · Accepted Answer · 2017-07-24T20:21:01

You can't pass in tags as parameters to roles inside your playbook. What you are effectively doing here is adding another tag to your manager role (renewal, gen_cert).

Instead of defining your tags with variables use the --tags flag.

ansible-playbook -v -i sslhost.txt -e "APP_NAME=ssl-perf" --tags=renewal,gen_cert site.yml

Passing variable as tags to ansible roles does not work

1 Answers