ansible can't unarchive tar.gz file - ansible

Question

I'm trying to unarchive a tar.gz file with ansible (which I've done quite a bit) but for some reason I can't get around this error this time.
I keep getting:
"msg": "Failed to find handler for \"/tmp/ansible_mnXJGp/internalbuildscripts1.tar.gz\". Make sure the required command to extract the file is installed. Command \"/bin/tar\" could not handle archive. Command \"/usr/bin/unzip\" could not handle archive."
what weird is that it seems to be trying to use unzip on a tar.gz file.
the task looks like this:
- name: Download build scripts
unarchive:
src: https://sblah.com/internalbuildscripts1.tar.gz
dest: /home/xxxx/buildscripts
remote_src: yes

Answer 1

So I had the same problem and ended up debugging the unarchive module to find out why it thought it couldn't handle the file.
TL;DR My dest was a relative path. The check that unarchive did to check if gtar would handle the file was this:
/usr/local/bin/gtar --list -C ./my/dest/path -z -f /Users/fransf/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1603283396.0748851-45418-232955281061540/source
but it did this with the working dir ALSO set to ./my/dest/path, so it was effectively trying to untar into ./my/dest/path/my/dest/path, which didn't exist!
So that was the problem in my case. I changed to using an absolute path and unarchive was happy. I do think this is a bug and apparently a test case that isn't in the unarchive test suite yet.
Debugging the Ansible module
Run your playbook with the ANSIBLE_KEEP_REMOTE_FILES environment variable set to 1 (i.e. ANSIBLE_KEEP_REMOTE_FILES=1 ansible-playbook -vvvv deploy.yml). Somewhere in the output (if you run with -vvvv) you'll see something like:
EXEC /bin/sh -c '/usr/local/Cellar/ansible/2.9.10/libexec/bin/python3.8 /Users/fransf/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1603283396.0748851-45418-232955281061540/AnsiballZ_unarchive.py && sleep 0'
Run that same command but with the explode parameter, like so:
/usr/local/Cellar/ansible/2.9.10/libexec/bin/python3.8 /Users/fransf/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1603283396.0748851-45418-232955281061540/AnsiballZ_unarchive.py explode
You'll get some output that tells you where the exploded module source was written to, e.g.
2955281061540/AnsiballZ_unarchive.py explode
Module expanded into:
/Users/fransf/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1603283396.0748851-45418232955281061540/debug_dir
Now you've got the Python source that you can either sprinkle with print statements or (this is what I did) run through an actual debugger. To run the module, use the same command as for exploding, but specify execute instead of explode:
/usr/local/Cellar/ansible/2.9.10/libexec/bin/python3.8 /Users/fransf/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1603283396.0748851-45418-232955281061540/AnsiballZ_unarchive.py execute
You can do this from the command line or from your IDE. I was already using IntelliJ Ultimate and installing the Python plugin was all I needed to be able to run this module through the debugger, set breakpoints, look at variables, and find out where it was messing up.
Hope this helps others with a similar problem.

Answer 2

I invite you to read #Frans answer first
I had almost the same problem:
Same error
The cause was that remote user is different from local one.
Workaround
Set ansible_remote_tmp to /tmp in the playbook
---
- name: "name of play"
hosts: all
become: true
vars:
# Setting this for unarchive to work
ansible_remote_tmp: /tmp