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 <ansible_configuration_settings>.

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 <linear_strategy> plugin. You can change this default in Ansible configuration <ansible_configuration_settings> 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 <playbook_keywords> 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.