How to execute pre tasks on all hosts before running tasks serial:1

Hi,

I have a playbook which deploys a new .war file for a tomcat instance. Since there are 6 hosts in a loadbalanced setup I have configured to run the playbook on 1 host at a time.
However, I want to do a ‘pre flight check’ on all hosts if the directory where the .war file is placed even exists, to make sure the playbook won’t break in the middle of a deployment.

Is there a way to execute tasks on all hosts before running serial=1 and thus doing the actual deployment?

Just create two plays in the same playbook file. The first can run in parallel and the second in serial.

I feel kinda stupid now. Thanks for pointing out the obvious!