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Question

Rundeck "Change the Target Nodes" issue

  • December 3, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 10 views
Pączek

I'm struggling with a job in Rundeck that includes an Ansible script, and I'm a bit confused about the node selection behavior.

Is it possible to prevent a job from running on all nodes when “Change the Target Nodes” is unchecked?

 

It feels contradictory that:

  • the UI offers “Select All” and “Select None”,
  • the job fails if no nodes are selected,
  • but if you uncheck “Change the Target Nodes” entirely, it just runs on every node anyway.

I assumed there must be a way to force explicit node selection before running the job, but I haven’t found anything in the documentation.

This is the screen I'm referring to:

 

1 reply

M
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  • MegaDrive68k
  • Dutonian
  • December 3, 2025

Hi,

When "Change the Target Nodes" is unchecked, Rundeck cannot prompt for a required node selection at runtime because the feature is effectively disabled. Without a filter, it defaults to .* (all nodes). There's no built-in setting to change this fallback behavior or to force explicit node selection before execution.

Rundeck's design philosophy is: if the job author disables runtime node selection, the job should use its defined Node Filter. If that filter is blank, it defaults to all nodes. The UI's "Select All" and "Select None" buttons only apply when users are given the option to choose nodes.

However, you can work around this by using a job option in your node filter. Define an option in your job (e.g., target_node) and reference it in your node filter like this: ${option.target_node}. This allows you to specify the target node at runtime through the option value.

Regards!

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