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community.general.archive – Creates a compressed archive of one or more files or trees

Note

This plugin is part of the community.general collection (version 3.8.1).

You might already have this collection installed if you are using the ansible package. It is not included in ansible-core. To check whether it is installed, run ansible-galaxy collection list.

To install it, use: ansible-galaxy collection install community.general.

To use it in a playbook, specify: community.general.archive.

Synopsis

  • Creates or extends an archive.
  • The source and archive are on the remote host, and the archive is not copied to the local host.
  • Source files can be deleted after archival by specifying remove=True.

Parameters

Parameter Choices/Defaults Comments
attributes
string
added in 2.3 of ansible.builtin
The attributes the resulting file or directory should have.
To get supported flags look at the man page for chattr on the target system.
This string should contain the attributes in the same order as the one displayed by lsattr.
The = operator is assumed as default, otherwise + or - operators need to be included in the string.

aliases: attr
dest
path
The file name of the destination archive. The parent directory must exists on the remote host.
This is required when path refers to multiple files by either specifying a glob, a directory or multiple paths in a list.
If the destination archive already exists, it will be truncated and overwritten.
exclude_path
list / elements=path
Default:
[]
Remote absolute path, glob, or list of paths or globs for the file or files to exclude from path list and glob expansion.
Use exclusion_patterns to instead exclude files or subdirectories below any of the paths from the path list.
exclusion_patterns
list / elements=path
added in 3.2.0 of community.general
Glob style patterns to exclude files or directories from the resulting archive.
This differs from exclude_path which applies only to the source paths from path.
force_archive
boolean
    Choices:
  • no ←
  • yes
Allows you to force the module to treat this as an archive even if only a single file is specified.
By default when a single file is specified it is compressed only (not archived).
Enable this if you want to use ansible.builtin.unarchive on an archive of a single file created with this module.
format
string
    Choices:
  • bz2
  • gz ←
  • tar
  • xz
  • zip
The type of compression to use.
Support for xz was added in Ansible 2.5.
group
string
Name of the group that should own the file/directory, as would be fed to chown.
mode
raw
The permissions the resulting file or directory should have.
For those used to /usr/bin/chmod remember that modes are actually octal numbers. You must either add a leading zero so that Ansible's YAML parser knows it is an octal number (like 0644 or 01777) or quote it (like '644' or '1777') so Ansible receives a string and can do its own conversion from string into number.
Giving Ansible a number without following one of these rules will end up with a decimal number which will have unexpected results.
As of Ansible 1.8, the mode may be specified as a symbolic mode (for example, u+rwx or u=rw,g=r,o=r).
If mode is not specified and the destination file does not exist, the default umask on the system will be used when setting the mode for the newly created file.
If mode is not specified and the destination file does exist, the mode of the existing file will be used.
Specifying mode is the best way to ensure files are created with the correct permissions. See CVE-2020-1736 for further details.
owner
string
Name of the user that should own the file/directory, as would be fed to chown.
path
list / elements=path / required
Remote absolute path, glob, or list of paths or globs for the file or files to compress or archive.
remove
boolean
    Choices:
  • no ←
  • yes
Remove any added source files and trees after adding to archive.
selevel
string
The level part of the SELinux file context.
This is the MLS/MCS attribute, sometimes known as the range.
When set to _default, it will use the level portion of the policy if available.
serole
string
The role part of the SELinux file context.
When set to _default, it will use the role portion of the policy if available.
setype
string
The type part of the SELinux file context.
When set to _default, it will use the type portion of the policy if available.
seuser
string
The user part of the SELinux file context.
By default it uses the system policy, where applicable.
When set to _default, it will use the user portion of the policy if available.
unsafe_writes
boolean
added in 2.2 of ansible.builtin
    Choices:
  • no ←
  • yes
Influence when to use atomic operation to prevent data corruption or inconsistent reads from the target file.
By default this module uses atomic operations to prevent data corruption or inconsistent reads from the target files, but sometimes systems are configured or just broken in ways that prevent this. One example is docker mounted files, which cannot be updated atomically from inside the container and can only be written in an unsafe manner.
This option allows Ansible to fall back to unsafe methods of updating files when atomic operations fail (however, it doesn't force Ansible to perform unsafe writes).
IMPORTANT! Unsafe writes are subject to race conditions and can lead to data corruption.

Notes

Note

  • Requires tarfile, zipfile, gzip and bzip2 packages on target host.
  • Requires lzma or backports.lzma if using xz format.
  • Can produce gzip, bzip2, lzma and zip compressed files or archives.

See Also

See also

ansible.builtin.unarchive

The official documentation on the ansible.builtin.unarchive module.

Examples

- name: Compress directory /path/to/foo/ into /path/to/foo.tgz
  community.general.archive:
    path: /path/to/foo
    dest: /path/to/foo.tgz

- name: Compress regular file /path/to/foo into /path/to/foo.gz and remove it
  community.general.archive:
    path: /path/to/foo
    remove: yes

- name: Create a zip archive of /path/to/foo
  community.general.archive:
    path: /path/to/foo
    format: zip

- name: Create a bz2 archive of multiple files, rooted at /path
  community.general.archive:
    path:
    - /path/to/foo
    - /path/wong/foo
    dest: /path/file.tar.bz2
    format: bz2

- name: Create a bz2 archive of a globbed path, while excluding specific dirnames
  community.general.archive:
    path:
    - /path/to/foo/*
    dest: /path/file.tar.bz2
    exclude_path:
    - /path/to/foo/bar
    - /path/to/foo/baz
    format: bz2

- name: Create a bz2 archive of a globbed path, while excluding a glob of dirnames
  community.general.archive:
    path:
    - /path/to/foo/*
    dest: /path/file.tar.bz2
    exclude_path:
    - /path/to/foo/ba*
    format: bz2

- name: Use gzip to compress a single archive (i.e don't archive it first with tar)
  community.general.archive:
    path: /path/to/foo/single.file
    dest: /path/file.gz
    format: gz

- name: Create a tar.gz archive of a single file.
  community.general.archive:
    path: /path/to/foo/single.file
    dest: /path/file.tar.gz
    format: gz
    force_archive: true

Return Values

Common return values are documented here, the following are the fields unique to this module:

Key Returned Description
archived
list / elements=string
success
Any files that were compressed or added to the archive.
arcroot
string
always
The archive root.
dest_state
string
added in 3.4.0 of community.general
 success
The state of the dest file.
absent when the file does not exist.
archive when the file is an archive.
compress when the file is compressed, but not an archive.
incomplete when the file is an archive, but some files under path were not found.
expanded_exclude_paths
list / elements=string
always
The list of matching exclude paths from the exclude_path argument.
expanded_paths
list / elements=string
always
The list of matching paths from paths argument.
missing
list / elements=string
success
Any files that were missing from the source.
state
string
always
The state of the input path.


Authors

  • Ben Doherty (@bendoh)

© 2012–2018 Michael DeHaan
© 2018–2021 Red Hat, Inc.
Licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3.
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/general/archive_module.html