Executing playbooks for troubleshooting

When you are testing new plays or debugging playbooks, you may need to run the same play multiple times. To make this more efficient, Ansible offers two alternative ways to execute a playbook: start-at-task and step mode.

start-at-task

To start executing your playbook at a particular task (usually the task that failed on the previous run), use the --start-at-task option.

ansible-playbook playbook.yml --start-at-task="install packages"

In this example, Ansible executes your playbook starting at a task named “install packages”. If the play containing the task has play-level fact gathering or argument validation, the implicit play-level tasks execute first.

Warning

This feature does not work with tasks inside dynamically reused roles or tasks (include_*), see Comparing includes and imports: dynamic and static reuse or use ref:step to skip tasks and ref:playbook_debugger to redo tasks.

Step mode

To execute a playbook interactively, use --step.

ansible-playbook playbook.yml --step

With this option, Ansible stops on each task and asks if it should execute that task. For example, if you have a task called “configure ssh”, the playbook run will stop and ask.

Perform task: configure ssh (y/n/c):

Answer “y” to execute the task, answer “n” to skip the task, and answer “c” to exit step mode, executing all remaining tasks without asking.