Documentation homepage Last update: Sep 22, 2021

Strategy plugins

Strategy plugins control the flow of play execution by handling task and host scheduling. For more information on using strategy plugins and other ways to control execution order, see playbooks_strategies.

Enabling strategy plugins

All strategy plugins shipped with Ansible are enabled by default. You can enable a custom strategy plugin by putting it in one of the lookup directory sources configured in ansible.cfg.

Using strategy plugins

Only one strategy plugin can be used in a play, but you can use different ones for each play in a playbook or ansible run. By default Ansible uses the linear plugin. You can change this default in Ansible configuration using an environment variable:

export ANSIBLE_STRATEGY=free

or in the `ansible.cfg` file:

[defaults]
strategy=linear

You can also specify the strategy plugin in the play via the strategy keyword in a play:

- hosts: all
  strategy: debug
  tasks:
    - copy: src=myhosts dest=/etc/hosts
      notify: restart_tomcat

    - package: name=tomcat state=present

  handlers:
    - name: restart_tomcat
      service: name=tomcat state=restarted

Plugin list

You can use ansible-doc -t strategy -l to see the list of available plugins. Use ansible-doc -t strategy <plugin name> to see plugin-specific specific documentation and examples.

seealso:

about_playbooks An introduction to playbooks

inventory_plugins Inventory plugins

callback_plugins Callback plugins

filter_plugins Filter plugins

test_plugins Test plugins

lookup_plugins Lookup plugins User Mailing List Have a question? Stop by the google group!

communication_irc How to join Ansible chat channels