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 2.5.1).

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		Remote absolute path, glob, or list of paths or globs for the file or files to exclude from path list and glob expansion.
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).
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.
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 current state of the archived file. If 'absent', then no source files were found and the archive does not exist. If 'compress', then the file source file is in the compressed state. If 'archive', then the source file or paths are currently archived. If 'incomplete', then an archive was created, but not all source paths were found.

Authors

• Ben Doherty (@bendoh)