# Running remote playbooks within a play **URL:** \ **Category:** Ansible Project\ **Created:** [April 2, 2014, 5:32pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/running-remote-playbooks-within-a-play/14922 "2014-04-02T17:32:11Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![herby.gillot1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/8e8cbc/32.png) [@herby.gillot1](https://forum.ansible.com/u/herby.gillot1)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2014, 5:32pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/running-remote-playbooks-within-a-play/14922/1 "2014-04-02T17:32:11Z")
Purely out of curiosity, what is the suggested course of action to run playbooks present on a remote host within a current run of a local Ansible play? The worst case being to use the shell module to actually exec Ansible remotely with the remote playbook, are there more elegant approaches? ---
**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5e9695/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan1](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan1)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2014, 8:22pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/running-remote-playbooks-within-a-play/14922/2 "2014-04-02T20:22:44Z")
Calling Ansible with Ansible? There is no suggested course of action, but I suspect you would do exactly that. I’d really want to understand the _why_ though. ---
**Author:** ![herby.gillot1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/8e8cbc/32.png) [@herby.gillot1](https://forum.ansible.com/u/herby.gillot1)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2014, 12:49am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/running-remote-playbooks-within-a-play/14922/3 "2014-04-03T00:49:24Z")
So let’s say you have the following situation: - You have some sizable number of hosts, with some particular software that contains its own set of playbooks. - There may be differences in the software versions, and thus playbooks can differ between sets of these remote hosts. - You also have inventory and playbooks outside of these hosts, in your local environment. - You want to run both the local and remote playbooks using the same (local) inventory. In the situation where you don’t care about local inventory or context, I guess kicking off a remote execution of Ansible using the shell module or SSH would be an option. But if you _did_ care about the current operating context, it would be interesting if Ansible were able to start a remote “slave” runner that would then run the remote playbooks/roles using the inventory and context delivered from your current local Ansible running instance (the parent/master). The remote runner would run the remote plays with the host/inventory\_hostname set to the remote host’s, but at least you’d be able to share context such as facts, variables and inventory and be able to run plays/roles that exist on the remote side. (Just an idea.) ---
**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5e9695/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan1](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan1)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2014, 10:10pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/running-remote-playbooks-within-a-play/14922/4 "2014-04-03T22:10:37Z")
Yeah I’m not seeing where you need this yet. Depends on the scale of your infrastructure, but plenty of very very large setups are not doing this – and really, if you are in that area, treating cloud like cloud and using Ansible to build images is often a great option. ---
**Author:** ![Erik\_Anderson](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/71c47a/32.png) [@Erik\_Anderson](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Erik_Anderson)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2014, 3:26pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/running-remote-playbooks-within-a-play/14922/5 "2014-04-04T15:26:26Z")
Just to provide another perspective, we have a use case for running remote playbooks, and are doing this this via the shell module. We really have two Ansible use cases - one is using Ansible in a "traditional" sense for provisioning servers, building images, etc. Our second use case is, I guess, a bit nonstandard. That being the configuration of on-premise server "appliances" installed in our customer's datacenters. We let customers provide configuration information - this gets saved to a local facts file, which is then used by a local playbook to apply the configuration. Sometimes this playbook is executed in a "standalone" fashion, independent of our centralized provisioning system, but sometimes it is executed remotely via another centralized playbook. -Erik