I'm having the following Ansible hosts file:
# Contains the host mappings
[master]
m1.my-host.com ansible_host=192.168.0.100
[node]
n1.my-host.com ansible_host=192.168.0.102
n2.my-host.com ansible_host=192.168.0.103
[k3s_cluster:children]
master
node
[all:vars]
ansible_python_interpreter=/usr/bin/python3
In my playbook, I'm saying that I need an ordered execution like this:
---
- name: Setup hostname, users and groups
hosts: all
order: sorted
gather_facts: true
remote_user: myuser
become: yes
roles:
- {role: common, tags: ['host', 'system']}
But when I ran it, I get to see the following:
TASK [Gathering Facts] **********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [n1.my-host.com]
ok: [n2.my-host.com]
ok: [m1.my-host.com]
I would have rather expected it to be m1, n1 and then n2. Is there any idea as to why the sort order is not respected?
The sort order is being respected, but because Ansible executes tasks against multiple hosts in parallel, you see the results in the order in which the task completes.
If you were to serialize your task execution like this:
- hosts: all
order: sorted
serial: 1
gather_facts: false
tasks:
- ping:
You would see that the order of execution is consistently:
Generally you don't want to serialize execution like that because it dramatically increases the runtime of your playbook, but if you have a very large number of hosts it sometimes makes sense to use a number > 1 to execute tasks in batches.