make entire playbook local

[shantanugadgil]

I have discovered spot today and seems really nice. 👍

I was wondering if there is a way to make the entire playbook "local" and not have to mark every script execution as local: true.

basically mimic the behavior of ansible-local and run everything locally as the specified user (or current user if not specified)

[umputun]

this is similar to #304, #204 and even #205

I'm not convinced this functionality is needed. Setting --target=localhost will run the playbook against localhost. While this still uses SSH to connect to localhost (requiring SSH server and keys), this is intentional design - it provides consistency in how Spot executes commands regardless of target.

If you truly need to run commands locally without SSH, you can:

1. Mark individual commands with local: true
2. Mark entire tasks with options: {local: true} to apply to all commands in that task

The current explicit approach has several advantages:

• No surprising behavior - you know exactly which commands run locally vs remotely
• Allows mixing local and remote commands within the same playbook
• Useful for testing playbooks with SSH connectivity to localhost
• Avoids ambiguity (what about 127.0.0.1, ::1, LAN IPs, etc.)

Could you explain your specific use case where the current options don't work? Understanding the actual problem might help find a better solution than adding another global flag or mode that changes fundamental execution behavior.

[shantanugadgil]

Could you explain your specific use case where the current options don't work? Understanding the actual problem might help find a better solution than adding another global flag or mode that changes fundamental execution behavior.

The use case is that there will configurations (OS and software tweaks) which will be downloaded from an external source like S3, etc. which will be machine specific.

spot binary will be already part of the OS (AMI for AWS) and will execute the "run" as part of post install.

About the other point ...

Mark entire tasks with options: {local: true} to apply to all commands in that task

How to do this? I am new here, could you point me to an example, thanks in advance.

If there is one-and-only-one place where I can add something like local: true I am on with this change. Adding local to each individual task is quite cumbersome.

[umputun]

you can set options on task level, same way as you do on command level

[shantanugadgil]

OK, I get it now ... upon squinting at more at podcast.yml and minimal.yml 👍

[umputun]

added with --local flag, see #318

[shantanugadgil]

This works! Awesome!!! 🎉

[shantanugadgil]

looking forward to the next release! 👍