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TODO:

Overall structure.
Initial draft complete
Testing
Ready

Copying to a remote host

To copy a file from the ansible controller, you can use the copy module. When using a role structure, the files directory acts as a relative path.

Copy content to a file

copy a file to a remote host

Ansible

- name: Copy file with owner and permissions
  copy:
    src: foo.conf
    dest: /etc/foo.conf
    owner: foo
    group: foo
    mode: '0644'

Copy files on the remote node by setting remote_src

Ansible

- name: Copy a "sudoers" file on the remote machine for editing
  copy:
    src: /etc/sudoers
    dest: /etc/sudoers.edit
    remote_src: yes
    validate: /usr/sbin/visudo -csf %s

Fetch: copy file from a remote host

Copy a file from the remote host to the ansible controller

Ansible

- name: Fetch remote file into /tmp/fetched/host.example.com/tmp/file
  fetch:
    src: /tmp/file
    dest: /tmp/fetched

Syncing files

Synchronize is generally faster than copy, but requires rsync

Synchronize a lot of files

Ansible

- name: Synchronize passing in extra rsync options
  synchronize:
    src: myapp
    dest: /var/www/myapp
    rsync_opts:
      - "--no-motd"
      - "--exclude=.git"

get_url: Transfering files from the internet

Download files with a checksum URL

Ansible

- name: Download file with checksum url (sha256)
  get_url:
    url: http://example.com/path/file.conf
    dest: /etc/foo.conf
    checksum: sha256:http://example.com/path/sha256sum.txt

Using checksum for idempotence prevents re-downloading files if they already exist.

Last update: 2020-01-19