.. _playbooks_strategies:

Strategies
===========

Strategies are a way to control play execution. By default, plays run with a  ``linear`` strategy, in which all hosts will run each task before any host starts the next task, using the number of forks (default 5) to parallelize.

The ``serial`` directive can 'batch' this behaviour to a subset of the hosts, which then run to
completion of the play before the next 'batch' starts.

A second ``strategy`` ships with Ansible - ``free`` - which allows each host to run until the end of
the play as fast as it can.::

    - hosts: all
      strategy: free
      tasks:
      ...


Strategy Plugins
`````````````````

The strategies are implemented as plugins. In the future, new
execution strategies can be added, either locally by users or to Ansible itself by
a code contribution.

One example is ``debug`` strategy. See :doc:`playbooks_debugger` for details.

.. seealso::

   :doc:`playbooks`
       An introduction to playbooks
   :doc:`playbooks_reuse_roles`
       Playbook organization by roles
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   `irc.freenode.net <http://irc.freenode.net>`_
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