"~username" in "file" not expanded

[Lx]

Given a call like this:

- xml: file=~user/data.xml ...

the following error occurs:

The target XML source does not exist: ~user/data.xml

even though built-in Ansible modules correctly expand ~user to the correct thing (which may not necessarily be /home/user).

[Lx]

I see that this issue is addressed by pending pull request #10.

[cmprescott]

I wouldn't hold your breath for them to merge in my PR. This project seems to be dead. If you need a workaround you can do something like {{ path | expanduser }}. More details on http://docs.ansible.com/playbooks_filters.html

[Lx]

Thanks for this workaround—much tidier than mine, which involved register-ing a shell call to echo ~user.

I hope development picks up again, because there doesn't seem to be another robust solution at this time for reading and writing XML from Ansible tasks.

[Lx]

Caveat for anyone else following: templates are rendered locally, so expanduser operates on data from the local machine, not the remote machine. To retrieve a home directory path for an arbitrary user on the remote machine, I'm back to doing this:

- name: note absolute home directory location for XML manipulation
  shell: echo ~user
  changed_when: false
  register: user_home_dir

[tbielawa]

We're going to make an announcement about our livelihood very soon :-)
On May 3, 2015 1:37 AM, "Chris Prescott" notifications@github.com wrote:

I wouldn't hold your breath for them to merge in my PR. This project seems
to be dead. If you need a workaround you can do something like {{ path |
expanduser }}. More details on
http://docs.ansible.com/playbooks_filters.html

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
https://github.com/RHInception/ansible-xml/issues/13#issuecomment-98439712
.

[tbielawa]

Closed when #10 was merged