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About Luca Berton

Luca Berton is an Ansible automation expert, author of 8 Ansible books published by Apress and Leanpub including "Ansible for VMware by Examples" and "Ansible for Kubernetes by Example", and creator of the Ansible Pilot YouTube channel. He shares practical automation knowledge through tutorials, books, and video courses to help IT professionals and DevOps engineers master infrastructure automation.

Ansible fetch Module: Copy Files from Remote Hosts to Control Node

By Luca Berton · Published 2024-01-01 · Category: troubleshooting

How to copy files from remote hosts with Ansible fetch module (ansible.builtin.fetch). Download logs, configs, backups from Linux and Windows.

Ansible fetch Module: Copy Files from Remote Hosts to Control Node

How to Copy files from Windows remote hosts with Ansible?

See also: Ansible win_copy Module: Copy Files to Windows Hosts (ansible.windows.win_copy)

Ansible Copy files from Windows remote hosts

  • ansible.builtin.fetch
  • Copy files from remote nodes
Today we're talking about the Ansible module fetch. The full name is ansible.builtin.fetch which means is part of the collection of modules "builtin" with ansible and shipped with it. This module is pretty stable and out for years. The purpose is to copy files from remote locations. Please note that the opposite is done by Ansible copy module for Linux and Ansible win_copy module for Windows.

Parameters

  • dest path - the local path
  • src string - Remote file path
  • fail_on_missing boolean - yes / no
  • validate_checksum boolean - yes / no
  • flat boolean - no / yes
The parameter list is pretty wide but I'll summarize the most useful. The only required parameters are "dest" which specifies a directory to save the file into and the "src" specifies the source files in the remote hosts. It must be a file, not a directory. The "fail_on_missing" boolean is set to true so the task is going to fail if the file doesn't exist. The file is going to be transferred and validated in the source and the destination with a checksum. If we don't want this behavior we could override with the "validate_checksum" option. The "flat" option allows you to override the default behavior of appending hostname/path/to/file to the destination.

## Playbook

Copy files from Windows remote hosts with Ansible Playbook.

code

---
- name: fetch module Playbook
  hosts: all
  become: false
  vars:
    myfile: 'C:\Users\vagrant\Desktop\example.txt'
    dump_dir: "logs"
  tasks:
    - name: fetch file
      ansible.builtin.fetch:
        src: "{{ myfile }}"
        dest: "{{ dump_dir }}"

execution

ansible-pilot $ ansible-playbook -i virtualmachines/win/inventory copy\ files\ from\ remote\ hosts/fetch-windows.yml
PLAY [fetch module Playbook] **************************************************************************
TASK [Gathering Facts] ****************************************************************************
ok: [WindowsServer]
TASK [fetch file] *********************************************************************************
changed: [WindowsServer]
PLAY RECAP ****************************************************************************************
WindowsServer              : ok=2    changed=1    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0
ansible-pilot $

idempotency

ansible-pilot $ ansible-playbook -i virtualmachines/win/inventory copy\ files\ from\ remote\ hosts/fetch-windows.yml
PLAY [fetch module Playbook] **************************************************************************
TASK [Gathering Facts] ****************************************************************************
ok: [WindowsServer]
TASK [fetch file] *********************************************************************************
ok: [WindowsServer]
PLAY RECAP ****************************************************************************************
WindowsServer              : ok=2    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0
ansible-pilot $

before execution

fetch before execution

after execution

ansible-pilot $ ls -al copy\ files\ from\ remote\ hosts/logs 
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  3 lberton  staff   96 Jan 31 12:34 .
drwxr-xr-x  5 lberton  staff  160 Jan 31 12:34 ..
drwxr-xr-x  3 lberton  staff   96 Jan 31 12:34 WindowsServer
ansible-pilot $ ls -al copy\ files\ from\ remote\ hosts/logs/WindowsServer 
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  3 lberton  staff  96 Jan 31 12:34 .
drwxr-xr-x  3 lberton  staff  96 Jan 31 12:34 ..
drwxr-xr-x  3 lberton  staff  96 Jan 31 12:34 C:
ansible-pilot $ ls -al copy\ files\ from\ remote\ hosts/logs/WindowsServer/C:/Users/vagrant/Desktop
total 8
drwxr-xr-x  3 lberton  staff  96 Jan 31 12:34 .
drwxr-xr-x  3 lberton  staff  96 Jan 31 12:34 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 lberton  staff  15 Jan 31 12:34 example.txt
ansible-pilot $ cat copy\ files\ from\ remote\ hosts/logs/WindowsServer/C:/Users/vagrant/Desktop/example.txt
example content%
ansible-pilot $

code with ❤️ in GitHub

See also: Ansible fetch Module: Download Files from Remote Hosts (Complete Guide)

Conclusion

Now you know how to Copy files from Windows remote hosts with Ansible.

Category: troubleshooting

Watch the video: Ansible fetch Module: Copy Files from Remote Hosts to Control Node — Video Tutorial

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