Is there with_fileglob that works remotely in ansible? - ansible

Question

Is there with_fileglob that works remotely in ansible?
Mainly I do want to use something similar with the with_fileglob but that will glob the files on the remote/target machine, not on the one that is running ansible.

Answer 1

Use find module to filter the files and then process the resulting list:
- name: Get files on remote machine
find:
paths: /path/on/remote
register: my_find
- debug:
var: item.path
with_items: "{{ my_find.files }}"

Answer 2

All of the with_* looping mechanisms are local lookups unfortunately so there's no really clean way to do this in Ansible. Remote operations by design must be enclosed in tasks as it would need to deal with connections and inventory etc.
What you can do is generate your fileglob by shelling out to the host and then registering the output and looping over the stdout_lines part of the output.
So a trivial example may be something like this:
- name : get files in /path/
shell : ls /path/*
register: path_files
- name: fetch these back to the local Ansible host for backup purposes
fetch:
src : /path/"{{item}}"
dest: /path/to/backups/
with_items: "{{ path_files.stdout_lines }}"
This would connect to the remote host (e.g., host.example.com), get all the file names under /path/ and then copy them back to the Ansible host to the path: /path/host.example.com/.

Answer 3

Using ls /path/* didn't work for me, so here's an example that uses find and some simple regex to delete all nginx managed virtual hosts:
- name: get all managed vhosts
shell: find /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ -type f -name \*-managed.conf
register: nginx_managed_virtual_hosts
- name: delete all managed nginx virtual hosts
file:
path: "{{ item }}"
state: absent
with_items: "{{ nginx_managed_virtual_hosts.stdout_lines }}"
You could use it to find all files with a specific extension or any other mix. For instance to simply get all files in a directory: find /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ -type f.

Answer 4

Here's a way to do it so that you can loop through all found. In my example, i had to look for all instances of pip to wipe out awscli in preparation to install awscli v2.0. I've done similar with lineinfile to strip out vars in /etc/skel dotfiles
- name: search for pip
find:
paths: [ /usr/local/bin, /usr/bin ]
file_type: any
pattern: pip*
register: foundpip
- name: Parse out pip paths (say that 3 times fast)
set_fact:
pips: "{{ foundpip | json_query('files[*].path') }}"
- name: List all the found versions of pip
debug:
msg: "{{ pips }}"
#upgrading pip often leaves broken symlinks or older wrappers behind which doesn't affect pip but breaks playbooks so ignore!
- name: remove awscli with found versions of pip
pip:
name: awscli
state: absent
executable: "{{ item }}"
loop: "{{ pips }}"
ignore_errors: yes