copy - Copies files to remote locations.

Author:Michael DeHaan

Synopsis

The copy module copies a file on the local box to remote locations.

Options

parameter required default choices comments
backup no no
  • yes
  • no
Create a backup file including the timestamp information so you can get the original file back if you somehow clobbered it incorrectly. (added in Ansible 0.7)
content no
    When used instead of 'src', sets the contents of a file directly to the specified value. (added in Ansible 1.1)
    dest yes
      Remote absolute path where the file should be copied to. If src is a directory, this must be a directory too.
      directory_mode no
        When doing a recursive copy set the mode for the directories. If this is not set we will default the system defaults. (added in Ansible 1.5)
        force no yes
        • yes
        • no
        the default is yes, which will replace the remote file when contents are different than the source. If no, the file will only be transferred if the destination does not exist. (added in Ansible 1.1)
        others no
          all arguments accepted by the file module also work here
          src no
            Local path to a file to copy to the remote server; can be absolute or relative. If path is a directory, it is copied recursively. In this case, if path ends with "/", only inside contents of that directory are copied to destination. Otherwise, if it does not end with "/", the directory itself with all contents is copied. This behavior is similar to Rsync.
            validate no
              The validation command to run before copying into place. The path to the file to validate is passed in via '%s' which must be present as in the visudo example below. (added in Ansible 1.2)

              Examples


              # Example from Ansible Playbooks
              - copy: src=/srv/myfiles/foo.conf dest=/etc/foo.conf owner=foo group=foo mode=0644
              
              # Copy a new "ntp.conf file into place, backing up the original if it differs from the copied version
              - copy: src=/mine/ntp.conf dest=/etc/ntp.conf owner=root group=root mode=644 backup=yes
              
              # Copy a new "sudoers" file into place, after passing validation with visudo
              - copy: src=/mine/sudoers dest=/etc/sudoers validate='visudo -cf %s'
              

              Note

              The “copy” module recursively copy facility does not scale to lots (>hundreds) of files. For alternative, see synchronize module, which is a wrapper around rsync.

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