Get_url with wildcards

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1

Hello,

I have problems downloading a file from a https repository.
What is the best way to download a file where I don’t know the full file name?

Using wildcards * or regex ([.*]) in the url of the get_url module does not work.
I can get the entire html of the url with the uri module, but then I would need a way to parse all that html to get a list of files.
And then I would need to build a logic that selects the correct file.

The repository does not have an API. It is just a httpd repository.

How do you approach such a situation?

This is what I tried:

    - name: get_url module
      ansible.builtin.get_url:
        url: "https://my-domain.tld/mydir/*.md5"
        dest: .
        validate_certs: false

Regards
Roel

1 Like
2

Unfortunately, the get_url module is not going to work this way. You will have to do the discovery of the full URLs yourself first, then loop over the discovered URLs.

3 Likes
3

That’s simply not how HTTP is designed to work, regardless of what method you’re using for retrieval. You have to know the full location of the resource you’re requesting.

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4

I guess you are correct.

I used a workaround and parsed the html of the repository with curl and bash commands to get the file names. Maybe if the repository had an API there would be a more straightforward way.

5

as long as you’re aware of how incredibly brittle and likely to break, that can be … if the repo software changes the way it presents their HTML, you might be up all night trying to figure out why your playbooks broke.

6

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