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Ansible Copy Cheat Sheet

Shenzhen, China

Copying files from a local machine to the remote server​

---
- hosts: test
  tasks:
  - name: Ansible copy file to remote server
    copy:
      src: ~/sample.txt
      dest: /tmp 
---
- hosts: test
  tasks:
  - name: Ansible copy file force
    copy:
      src: ~/sample.txt
      dest: /tmp 
      force: no

Copying a directory from a local machine to the remote server​

---
- hosts: test
  tasks:
  - name: Ansible copy directory to the remote server
    copy:
      src:/Users/mdtutorials2/Documents/Ansible/copy_dir_ex
      dest:/Users/mdtutorials2/Documents/Ansible/tmp
output
------
tree tmp

tmp
└── copy_dir_ex
    ├── file1
    ├── file2
    ├── file3
    └── tmp2
        ├── file4
        └── file5
---
- hosts: test
  tasks:
  - name: Ansible copy files from a directory to remote server
    copy:
      src:/Users/mdtutorials2/Documents/Ansible/copy_dir_ex/
      dest:/Users/mdtutorials2/Documents/Ansible/tmp
output
------
tree tmp

tmp/
├── file1
├── file2
├── file3
└── tmp2
    ├── file4
    └── file5

Copying multiple files/directories using with_items​

---
- hosts: test
  tasks:
  - name: Ansible copy multiple files with_items
    copy:
      src: ~/{{item}}
      dest: /tmp
      mode: 0774
    with_items:
      ['hello1','hello2','hello3','sub_folder/hello4']

Copying multiple files with different permission/destination settings​

---
- hosts: test
  tasks:
  - name: Copy multiple files in Ansible with different permissions
    copy:
      src: "{{ item.src }}"
      dest: "{{ item.dest }}"
      mode: "{{item.mode}}"
    with_items:
      - { src: '~/test1',dest: '/tmp/system1', mode: '0777'}
      - { src: '~/test2',dest: '/tmp/system2', mode: '0707'}
      - { src: '~/test3',dest: '/tmp2/system3', mode: '0575'}
ls -lrt /tmp
drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 4096 Oct  9 14:28 system1
drwx---rwx 2 root root 4096 Oct  9 14:28 system2

ls -lrt /tmp2
-r-xrwxr-x 1 root root 0 Oct  9 14:33 system3

Copying all the files inside a folder that matches a pattern​

- hosts: test
  tasks:
  - name: Ansible copy multiple files with wildcard matching.
    copy:
      src: "{{ item }}"
      dest: /etc
    with_fileglob:
      - /tmp/hello*

Creating backup of a file in the remote servers before copy​

For example, the following example will create a backup of the helloworld.txt in the /tmp directory of the remote server.

- hosts: test
  tasks:
  - name: ansible copy file backup example
    copy:
      src: ~/helloworld.txt
      dest: /tmp
      backup: yes

Copying files from remote machine to the local machine​

By default, a directory named after each host you are connecting will be created in your destination directory (local machine). The fetched files will be copied there. If the file doesn’t exist on the remote server, no error will be thrown by default. In the following example, I am running the task on remote-server-1. The file will be copied into /etc/remote-server-1/tmp directory of the local machine.

- hosts: test
  tasks:
  - name: Ansible fetch files from remote server to the local machine using Ansible fetch module
    fetch:
      src: /tmp/hello2
      dest: /etc
      mode: 0774

If you don’t want this behavior and you need the file to be copied directly to the destination directory, then you should use the ‘flat’ parameter.

- hosts: test
  tasks:
  - name: Ansible fetch directory example with flat parameter set
    fetch:
      src: /tmp/hello2
      dest: /tmp/
      mode: 0774
      flat: yes

The following example will throw an error if the remote file does not exist.

- hosts: test
  tasks:
  - name: Ansible fetch example with fail_on_missing set
    fetch:
      src: /tmp/fetch.txt
      dest: /tmp/
      mode: 0774
      fail_on_missing: yes

Writing to a file using the copy module​

- hosts: test
  tasks:
  - name: Ansible write to a file example
  - copy:
      content: |
        Example Content.
        echo.txt will be created after this task is executed.
      dest: /tmp/echo.txt
      backup: yes