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 Controlling playbook execution: strategies and more.

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 with 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 documentation and examples.

Strategy plugins

Enabling strategy plugins

Using strategy plugins

Plugin list

Enabling strategy plugins 

Using strategy plugins 

Plugin list 