Missing something with host directory/file paths

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1

It’s been awhile since I played with Ansible and right now Im tearing my hair out on this copy problem. Im trying to copy a directory on a Linux host to a new location. In ad-hoc ansible, it looks like this…

ansible -m copy -a “src=/usr/share/folder1 dest=/config/folder2” servers

When I run this command, Ansible tells me it can’t find the directory…

10.10.10.107 | FAILED! => {
“changed”: false,
“failed”: true,
“msg”: “Unable to find ‘/usr/share/folder1’ in expected paths.”
}

Yet, when I go on the host, I can clearly see that the source directory exists. Im thinking this is something terribly obvious since I’ve now tried this on multiple hosts and get the same error each time. I know Ansible is working because I can run adhoc shell commands and touch files, see the pwd, etc.

Any ideas at all? What am I missing?

Thanks!

2

by default ansible looks in the local ‘controller’ for the src= parameter, you need to use remote_src=yes for it to look for it on the target machine.

Also note that remote_src=yes does not support recursive copying.

3

Thank you! Is there a better means to recursively copy then? Or do I need to copy each file separately?

4

I’ll answer this for myself. Seems like just using the command module and doing the copy that way is the best approach.

Thanks for putting me on the right track!