Delegate _execute_method and access inventory in ActionModule

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1

Hi all,

I am currently developing an Action-module which should do the following:

I have a playbook like this:

  • hosts: target-host
    tasks:
  • my_module:
    src_host: source-host
    regex: some_regex

It should be checked if a file which meets the regex can be found on the source-host. If so, it should be copied to the target-host via the controller-node. I can’t copy the file directly because of security-restrictions.

Currently I solved this by just using paramiko which works fine but isn’t a clean solution.

Questions/What I want to do instead:

  1. I would like to access the inventory inside of my Action-Module to get ansible_user, ansible_password and ansible_port of the source-host and target-host. How can I achieve this? I tried to use the InventoryManager without success. Currently i provide all these values as parameters.

  2. A far better solution would be, to use _execute_module and execute the find-module on the source-host and then copy the file via the copy-module to the controller-node and the target-host. But it seems there is no delegate-option for execute_module so (by looking at the play from above) it will always be executed on the target-host

Any help or pointing me into the right direction would be very much apricated. Couldn’t find any suitable solution so far even after hours.

Thanks and best regads,
Felix

2

Import required modules

from ansible.plugins.action import ActionBase

class ActionModule(ActionBase):
def run(self, tmp=None, task_vars=None):

Initialize variables

result = super(ActionModule, self).run(tmp, task_vars)
should_delegate = True # Determine if delegation is needed

Access inventory variables

source_host_vars = self._task_vars[‘hostvars’][self._task.args[‘src_host’]]
target_host_vars = self._task_vars[‘hostvars’][self._task.args[‘inventory_hostname’]]

Prepare task_args for remote task execution

task_args = {
‘module_name’: ‘find’,
‘module_args’: f"path={source_host_vars[‘source_path’]} patterns={{ {self._task.args[‘regex’]} }}",
‘inventory’: self._task._inventory,
‘subset’: [self._task.args[‘src_host’]],
}

if should_delegate:

Remote execution

result[‘remote_result’] = self._execute_module(task_args=task_args)
else:

Local execution

Perform necessary local actions

result[‘local_result’] = “Performed local actions”

Handle file transfers

if should_delegate:

Execute remote copy task

copy_task_args = {
‘module_name’: ‘copy’,
‘module_args’: f"src={result[‘remote_result’][‘files’][0]} dest=/destination/path",
‘inventory’: self._task._inventory,
‘subset’: [self._task.args[‘inventory_hostname’]],
}
result[‘copy_result’] = self._execute_module(task_args=copy_task_args)

return result