Ansible - prevent gathering facts for hosts that are not used

Question

I have a playbook.yml along the lines:

- name: Play1
  hosts: vm1
  ...
  tags: pl1

- name: Play2
  hosts: vm2
  ...
  tags: pl2

Now imagine scenario, that vm1 is dead and I don't care about it for the time being and I want to run only the 2nd play like this:

ansible-playbook playbook.yml --tags=pl2

But now, Ansible fails with the error when gathering facts for vm1 . Is there a way to instruct Ansible to be smarter and ignore other plays completely? And why does it even do that?

Answer 1

^{If you really think that's the best way to manage your servers...}

Use gather_facts: false and add explicitly a setup task:

- name: Play1
  gather_facts: no
  hosts: vm1
  pre_tasks:
    - setup:
  ...
  tags: pl1

Answer 2

I think what you're looking for is the --limit option, which only runs tasks on the specified host(s) and/or group(s).

ansible-playbook playbook.yml --limit=vm2

https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.9/user_guide/intro_patterns.html