Copying Files and Directories in Ansible: Understanding the Copy and Fetch Modules

Copying Files

Copying Files and Directories in Ansible: Understanding the Copy and Fetch Modules

In this blog post, we will discuss how to copy files and directories in Ansible using the Copy and Fetch modules. Files can be copied from a local or remote location, and directories can be copied recursively. The Copy module is used for copying single files while the Fetch module is used for copying multiple files. Files are copied by default with the timestamps preserved; however, we can change that behavior if we need to as well as delete destination files after they have been successfully transferred (for example when transferring tarballs).

The Copy and Fetch modules are very handy when we need to copy files or directories from one location to another. Let’s take a look at how they work.

We can also use the Copy module to copy files between two local locations. For example, the following command copies the file /tmp/localFile to the directory /tmp/destinationDirectory.

Copying a directory from the local machine to remote server using Ansible copy module 

You can also copy folders/directories using this tool. If your ‘src’ path is a folder, it’ll be copied recursively and then you will end up with everything inside that sub-folder being copied as well! There are two different variations for doing this – depending on whether there’s an ending ‘/’ character at either end of our source argument (i e if we’re just copying over some files), or not; which one depends entirely upon what kind of environment setup was done when running config management software like Service Desk Hosting Manager(Sedo)

Copying files between different folders on the same remote machine

You can also copy files between various locations across multiple servers. To do so, simply set Remote Source to Yes and enter your password when prompted for it (which will happen automatically if you use default credentials).

Copying multiple files with the same permission and destination is easy, but what if you want to set different permissions or maybe move them somewhere else? You can use ‘with_items’ along with dictionary structure.

 Files and directories can be copied between machines with Ansible. 

This is done using the Copy and Fetch modules, which are included in the coreutils module. The Copy module is used to copy files and folders from one location to another, while the Fetch module downloads files from a remote source and places them in a local folder. In this article, we will discuss how to use these modules to copy files and directories between different folders on the same remote machine, as well as between multiple servers. We will also look at some of the options available for copying files with different permissions or moving them to a new location. Finally, we will see how to use ‘with_items’ along with dictionary structure when copying multiple files.