Unarchive should support unpacking remote archives

[Bilge]

If I wish to download an archive on the remote host using get_url then the unarchive module is unable to help me extract it since unarchive only extracts local archives. In its current implementation, the only way to achieve this is:

• get_url the file on the remote host
• fetch it back to the local host
• unarchive it back to the remote host

This is incredibly wasteful and nigh on ridiculous. Unarchive should be able to extract remote archives.

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[mpdehaan]

First request -- Please don't call contributors contributions ridiculous -- I'm very thankful for unarchive, and it's true it could do more. However, because a personal itch hasn't been scratched doesn't mean there isn't a lot of value in a new module, and I'm thankful for it.

This feature idea is also slightly based on an assumption that the unarchive module must be handled in three step process. It's two. Download to the local host, push it to the remote. This requires an extra line or two,

• get_url: http://foo dest=/path/to/file.tgz
• unarchive: src=/path/to/file.tgz ...

Which is a little longer than normal, but it's not any more wasteful on bandwidth. It wastes an additional line in the playbook, but that's all.

[Bilge]

get_url does not download to the local host, it downloads to the remote host, nor do I want to download to the local host so your steps would not be functionally equivalent even if it did work that way. Which it doesn't.

[mpdehaan]

The get_url module will download to any host you run the play on, actually. You can do that in a local play, or use "delegate_to/local_action".

The play is a better approach.

[Bilge]

I don't know what you're talking about but I thought I made it clear I don't want to download to the local host. The problem is that get_url works on the remote side and unarchive works on the local side. Therefore they cannot be used together directly.

[mpdehaan]

Not directly, but they can in fact be used in conjunction.

- hosts: localhost
  tasks:
     - get_url: ...

- hosts: managed
  tasks:
      - unarchive: ...

[mpdehaan]

If you don't need to download to the control machine, this is just two tasks in the same play

  tasks:
      - get-url: ...
      - unarchive: ...

There would be no fetch in either case.

[Bilge]

get_url will always download to the remote machine because it only takes remote paths.
unarchive will always extract from a file on the local machine because it only operates on local paths.

To be clear, you can name remote and local anything you like. Master/slave, control/minion. Whatever you call it, these two modules cannot operate on the same file back to back.

Try testing your play. It doesn't make sense.

Also, aren't you like the main guy behind Ansible? If so I should just retire to SaltStack. Hatch never behaves like this when people try to offer useful suggestions on his tracker.

[mpdehaan]

There's no argument going on here that I can tell, the ticket is still open and I'm trying to show you how to work around the problem without "fetch" above.

It's evident I did make an error in my last post, switch "unarchive" to "shell: tar -xvf creates=some/path" and you'd have the same result.

As I'm not liking where this thread is going we will be retiring this discussion however, please feel free to adopt another tool if you wish.

[Bilge]

Wow.

[martinalig]

Any chances to see this opened again? I think its quite confusing that unarchive does not work remotely...

[GonzaloAlvarez]

+1 to reopen this again. I also believe it is quite confusing that unarchive works only with local files. Also, I think it is not a good practice to encourage playbook devs to have the tar files within the local dir, because you usually have your playbooks tracked with a version system tool (such as git) and it is not nice to have big binary files within.

[yauh]

I am also in favor of having another attribute like localfile=true|false or source=local|remote to make this issue easily solvable. I spend quite a while figuring out why I couldn't perform a simple unarchive action until I read the docs more closely. It may become much more obvious with a simple switch to tell where the source is located.

[bcoca]

from unarchive's docs, just set copy=false

Brian Coca
Stultorum infinitus est numerus
0110000101110010011001010110111000100111011101000010000001111001011011110111010100100000011100110110110101100001011100100111010000100001
Pedo mellon a minno

[yauh]

@bcoca indeed this works fine for me.I guess I thought that either the archive is copied and then extracted or extracted over ssh onto the remote machine, depending on the setting. But it never occurred to me, that copy=false would actually look for a remote file instead of a local one.

So basically the functionality is there and the issue is solved for me :-)

[Bilge]

It didn't occur to anyone else in this thread, either. The issue is not solved until the docs are rewritten to be clearer on this functionality.

[GonzaloAlvarez]

I tested it and it worked! :)
Anyhow, I agree the issue should be reopened until docs are updated...

[bcoca]

I'm getting 404 on pull request attempts in github, but here is my proposed
change

bcoca@413a50f

​

[hoggle64]

It's still unclear to me - sorry:

I get this error:
src (or content) and dest are required

when I do this:
unarchive: copy=no src={{ item.key }}

I've also tried this with the same result:
unarchive: copy=no dest={{ item.key }}

So - how can I extract a file on the target system without transfering it first ?

Thanks clarification.

[bcoca]

you need BOTH src and dest, i imagine you wan the following:

unarchive: copy=no src={{ item.key }} dest=/whererever/you/wantto/unarchive

Brian Coca
Stultorum infinitus est numerus
0110000101110010011001010110111000100111011101000010000001111001011011110111010100100000011100110110110101100001011100100111010000100001
Pedo mellon a minno

[hoggle64]

you're right.
src does not mean from the ansible machine.

That was a little confusing....

Thank you.

[ghost]

Thanks for clarifying and providing this example, very helpful.

[xiaokli-in]

I tried to unarchive a zip, and assign the unziped file to user.

• name: unzip file

  unarchive: src=/root/xxx.zip dest=/xxx/xx/ copy=no owner=someone group=somegroup

  sudo=yes

the assign of user did not work.

can anyboy help ?

[Atchuu]

If anyone wants to skip this thread... here's the cliff notes.

OP asks
@mpdehaan responds with reasonable response, not fully understanding the request
OP insults @mpdehaan
repeat 27,000 times....
@mpdehaan closes issue.
community clarifies that the "copy" parameter satisfies this request.

To @mpdehaan and the community, thank you for saving me time. To OP, sorry your days suck so much...