Ansible Fetch Module: Copy Files from Remote Hosts (Windows & Linux) — Video Tutorial

How to Copy files from Windows remote hosts with Ansible? I'm going to show you a live Playbook with some simple Ansible code. I'm Luca Berton and welcome to today's episode of Ansible Pilot. Ansible Copy files from Windows remote hosts - ansible.builtin.fetch - Copy files from remote nodes Today we're talking about the Ansible module `fetch`. The full name is `ansible.builtin.fetch` which means is part of the collection of modules "builtin" with ansible and shipped with it. This module is pretty stable and out for years. The purpose is to copy files from remote locations. Please note that the opposite is done by [Ansible copy module](/articles/copy-files-to-remote-hosts-ansible-module-copy) for Linux and [Ansible win_copy module](/articles/copy-files-to-windows-remote-hosts-ansible-module-wincopy) for Windows. Parameters - `dest` path - the local path - `src` string - Remote file path - `fail_on_missing` boolean - `yes` / `no` - `validate_checksum` boolean - `yes` / `no` - `flat` boolean - `no` / `yes` The parameter list is pretty wide but I'll summarize the most useful. The only required parameters are "dest" which specifies a directory to save the file into and the "src" specifies the source files in the remote hosts. It must be a file, not a directory. The "fail_on_missing" boolean is set to true so the task is going to fail if the file doesn't exist. The file is going to be transferred and validated in the source and the destination with a checksum. If we don't want this behavior we could override with the "validate_checksum" option. The "flat" option allows you to override the default behavior of appending hostname/path/to/file to the destination. ## Playbook Copy files from Windows remote hosts with Ansible Playbook. code ```yaml --- - name: fetch module Playbook hosts: all become: false vars: myfile: 'C:\Users\vagrant\Desktop\example.txt' dump_dir: "logs" tasks: - name: fetch file ansible.builtin.fetch: src: "{{ myfile }}" dest: "{{ dump_dir }}" ``` execution ```bash ansible-pilot $ ansible-playbook -i virtualmachines/win/inventory copy\ files\ from\ remote\ hosts/fetch-windows.yml PLAY [fetch module Playbook] ************************************************************************** TASK [Gathering Facts] **************************************************************************** ok: [WindowsServer] TASK [fetch file] ********************************************************************************* changed: [WindowsServer] PLAY RECAP **************************************************************************************** WindowsServer : ok=2 changed=1 unreachable=0 failed=0 skipped=0 rescued=0 ignored=0 ansible-pilot $ ``` idempotency ```bash ansible-pilot $ ansible-playbook -i virtualmachines/win/inventory copy\ files\ from\ remote\ hosts/fetch-windows.yml PLAY [fetch module Playbook] **************************************************************