Automatically generate ansible tags of the same name for each role in a playbook

auto_tags.py

"""
This module implements an Ansible plugin that is triggered at the start of a playbook.

The plugin dynamically generates a tag for each role. Each tag has the same name as its role.
The advantage of this is that it saves you some boilerplate, because you don't have to wrap
all tasks of a role in an additional block and assign a tag to that.
Additionally, it works automatically when you add new roles to your playbook.

Usage is exactly the same as without this plugin:

ansible-playbook --tags=some_tag provision.yml

Here, the "some_tag" tag was generated dynamically (assuming there is a "some_tag" role).

Installation:
1. Place this file in `plugins/callbacks/auto_tags.py` (relative to your playbook root)
2. Add the following two lines to your `ansible.cfg` file:

callback_plugins = plugins/callbacks
callback_whitelist = auto_tags
"""
from __future__ import print_function
from ansible.plugins.callback import CallbackBase


class CallbackModule(CallbackBase):
    """
    Ansible supports several types of plugins. We are using the *callback* type here, since
    it seemed the best choice for our use case, because it allows you to hook into the start
    of a playbook.
    """
    def v2_playbook_on_start(self, playbook):
        """
        Dynamically add a tag of the same name to each role.
        Note: Plays, roles, task_blocks and tasks can have tags.
        """
        plays = playbook.get_plays()

        # Note: Although identical roles are shared between plays we cannot deduplicate them,
        # since Ansible treats them as different objects internally
        roles = [role for play in plays for role in play.get_roles()]

        # Note: Tags for roles are set dynamically in `_load_role_data` instead of in __init__
        # I don't know why they do that.
        for role in roles:
            role_name = role._role_name
            if role_name not in role.tags:
                role.tags += [role_name]

This is great, thanks! My old approach broke in Ansible 2.5, but this restores it.

Thanks.

Thanks!

Great, thx for sharing

Really useful, thanks a lot :-)

cooool, thanks !

I can't find any documentation on how to get the filenames in the respective role directory and creating tags to only run those filenames.

This is what "tasks_from" does when you include a role so it must be possible

Thx, works fine in Ansible 2.10

Thank you. This is very useful.

[DEPRECATION WARNING]: [defaults]callback_whitelist option, normalizing names
to new standard, use callbacks_enabled instead. This feature will be removed
from ansible-core in version 2.15. Deprecation warnings can be disabled by
setting deprecation_warnings=False in ansible.cfg.

I would advise to change:
callback_whitelist = auto_tags to callbacks_enabled = auto_tags

Thanks very much for this.

Here is an adapted version that tags dependencies too:

from ansible.plugins.callback import CallbackBase

class CallbackModule(CallbackBase):

    def v2_playbook_on_start(self, playbook):
        for play in playbook.get_plays():
            self.tag_roles(play.get_roles())

    def tag_roles(self, roles):
        for role in roles:
            self.tag_role(role)
            self.tag_roles(role.get_direct_dependencies())

    def tag_role(self, role):
        role_name = role._role_name
        if role_name not in role.tags:
            role.tags += [role_name]