Using Tags on Digital Ocean

Digital Ocean has recently added the ability to tag your droplets.  Tags will let us better organize our workloads with targeted searchable tags to identify features, roles, names, or any type of information at all.

The tags implementation is different on Digital Ocean than some other environments, but you may find it similar to other content platforms rather than the AWS method of assigning tags and values.

In your Droplets list, click the More menu to get the dropdown.  Click on the Add tags links that you see for your droplet:

01-do-tag-menu

This brings up the Tags editor where you can type some tags which help to identify your droplet.  My example shows that I’m assigning the production, jenkins, cicd, and ubuntu tags to this droplet.  It happens to be a production Jenkins server:

02-add-tags

You’ll see the final results once you save the tags, and this is where we can now edit existing tags if needed:

03-view-tags

Searching for tags is a little different than you may think.  The search field on the droplets page is still tied to the name of the droplet.  To use tags for categorization and search, you can use the tags URL here:

04-url-tag-search

This gives us everything tagged as production which you can see by the tags column:

05-tag-view-columns

By clicking on the +3 link, you will also see the additional tags assigned to that droplet:

06-expand-tags-columns

All of the links and tags are clickable, which brings you to the categories that you’ll want to see.  By crafting your URL, you can choose which ones to query on.

That’s the basics of tagging for Digital Ocean, and hopefully you’ll find value in this.  More and more of the work that we do in cloud and data center platforms can make use of tags for numerous administrative functions.  This is the time to start getting used to using them.

 

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