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# 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 Playbook Debugger for details.

See also

Working With Playbooks
  An introduction to playbooks
Roles
  Playbook organization by roles
User Mailing List
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irc.freenode.net
  #ansible IRC chat channel