How to run only one task in ansible playbook?

Question

Is there a way to only run one task in ansible playbook?

For example, in roles/hadoop_primary/tasks/hadoop_master.yml. I have "start hadoop job tracker services" task. Can I just run that one task?

hadoop_master.yml file:

---
# Playbook for  Hadoop master servers

- name: Install the namenode and jobtracker packages
  apt: name={{item}} force=yes state=latest
  with_items: 
   - hadoop-0.20-mapreduce-jobtracker
   - hadoop-hdfs-namenode
   - hadoop-doc
   - hue-plugins

- name: start hadoop jobtracker services
  service: name=hadoop-0.20-mapreduce-jobtracker state=started
  tags:
   debug

Answer 1

You should use tags: as documented in http://docs.ansible.com/playbooks_tags.html

---

If you have a large playbook it may become useful to be able to run a specific part of the configuration without running the whole playbook.

Both plays and tasks support a “tags:” attribute for this reason.

Example:

tasks:

    - yum: name={{ item }} state=installed
      with_items:
         - httpd
         - memcached
      tags:
         - packages

    - template: src=templates/src.j2 dest=/etc/foo.conf
      tags:
         - configuration

If you wanted to just run the “configuration” and “packages” part of a very long playbook, you could do this:

ansible-playbook example.yml --tags "configuration,packages"

On the other hand, if you want to run a playbook without certain tasks, you could do this:

ansible-playbook example.yml --skip-tags "notification"

You may also apply tags to roles:

roles:
  - { role: webserver, port: 5000, tags: [ 'web', 'foo' ] }

And you may also tag basic include statements:

- include: foo.yml tags=web,foo

Both of these have the function of tagging every single task inside the include statement.