Action plugins exist to hook into the task construct without actually causing a module to be executed, or to execute code locally on the Ansible host before executing a module on the remote host. A number of action plugins are included with Ansible and can be found in plugins/action/. One such action plugin is the template plugin used in place of a template module. When a playbook author writes a template task, that task will actually call the template plugin to do the work. The plugin, among other things, will render the template locally before copying the content to the remote host. Because actions have to happen locally, the work is done by an action plugin. Another action plugin we should be familiar with is the debug plugin, which we've used heavily in this book to print content. Creating a custom action plugin is useful when trying to accomplish both local work and remote work in the same task.