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About Luca Berton

Luca Berton is an Ansible automation expert, author of "Ansible for VMware by Examples" and "Ansible for Kubernetes by Example" published by Apress, and creator of the Ansible Pilot YouTube channel. He shares practical automation knowledge through tutorials, books, and video courses to help IT professionals and DevOps engineers master infrastructure automation.

Ansible get_url Module: Download Files from URLs (ansible.builtin.get_url Guide) — Video Tutorial

Complete guide to Ansible get_url module (ansible.builtin.get_url). Download files from HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP URLs with checksum verification and authentication.

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How to download a file with Ansible? I'm going to show you a live Playbook and some simple Ansible code. I'm Luca Berton and welcome to today's episode of Ansible Pilot. Ansible download a file Today we're talking about the Ansible module `get_url`. The full name is `ansible.builtin.get_url`, which means that is part of the collection of modules "builtin" with ansible and shipped with it, part of `ansible-core`. It's a module pretty stable and out for years. It works in a different variety of operating systems. It downloads files from HTTP, HTTPS, or FTP to node For Windows targets, use the `ansible.windows.win_get_url` module instead. Main Parameters - `url` string - URL - `dest` string - path - `force` string - no/yes - `checksum` string - \:\ - `force_basic_auth`/`url_username`/`url_password`/use_gssapi - HTTP basic auth/GSSAPI-Kerberos - `headers` dictionary - custom HTTP headers - `http_agent` string - "ansible-httpget" - `owner`/`group`/`mode` string - permission - `setype`/`seuser`/`selevel` - SELinux This module has some parameters to perform any tasks. The two required parameters are `url` and `dest`. The `url` parameter specifies the URL of the resource you're going to download. The `dest` parameter specifies the filesystem path where the resource is going to be saved on the target node. Let's deep dive in the "force" parameter. If "dest" is a file, Ansible is going to download every time the file. If "dest" is a directory the default behavior is not to replace a file, until you toggle to `yes` the force parameter. The parameter "checksum" is very useful to validate the consistency of the downloaded file. You could specify the algorithm, usually sha1 or sha256, and directly the checksum or a URL for checksum. You might need the third-party `hashlib` library for access to additional algorithms. Another interesting parameter is "headers" which allow you to specify some custom HTTP headers. Ansible presents himself as "ansible-httpget" in the web server logs, but you cust customize it in the "http_agent" parameter. There are some additional parameters for authentication for example to handle HTTP basic authentication with username and password or for more complex GSSAPI-Kerberos scenarios using `httplib2` Python library. Let me also highlight that we could also specify the permission and SELinux properties. ## Playbook Let's jump in a real-life playbook on how to download a file with Ansible. - get_url.yml ```yaml --- - name: get_url module Playbook hosts: all become: false vars: myurl: "https://releases.ansible.com/ansible/ansible-2.9.25.tar.gz" mycrc: "sha256:https://releases.ansible.com/ansible/ansible-2.9.25.tar.gz.sha" mydest: "/home/devops" tasks: - name: download file ansible.builtin.get_url: url: "{{ myurl }}" dest: "{{ mydest }}" checksum: "{{ mycrc }}" mode: '0644' owner: devops group: wheel ``` [code with ❤️ in GitH

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