Strategy Plugins

Strategy plugins control the flow of play execution by handling task and host scheduling.

Enabling Strategy Plugins

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. The default is 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.