How to zip files and folders with Ansible

Posted on by Ansible admin

Working with Ansible archive module

Until version 2.3, Ansible didn’t support an Archive module(It was available in the developer edition for some time though). Before that, we had to use the shell module or command module to zip a directory in Ansible.

From 2.3 you can use the Ansible archive module to compress the files or folders into ‘.zip’, ‘.gz.’ and ‘bz2’ format.

Note: The files to be compressed should be available on the remote servers.

Note: The target servers should have the packages for tar file, bzip2, gzip, zipfile installed on them.You can have a separate task for checking and installing the packages.

Ansible zip file

To zip a file, we need at least one parameter, the file which is to be archived. The absolute path of the input file is to be given to the ‘path‘ parameter. This is the path on the target machine.

The destination path, if not specified will be the path of the input file itself. Both the target path and the filename can be set using the ‘dest‘ parameter.

You can also give the archive format you want. The default value is ‘.gz’. You can specify the ‘.zip’, ‘.gz’ or ‘.bz2’ against the ‘format’ parameter.

The following task will zip the file zipfile.txt to zipfile.txt.zip file.

- hosts: all
  tasks:
  - name: Ansible zip file example
    archive:
      path: /Users/mdtutorials2/Documents/Ansible/zipfile.txt
ACM:Ansible ACM$ ls -lrt
total 88
-rw-r--r--  1 root  staff  168 Jul 29 15:54 zipfile.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 root  staff  160 Aug  3 06:54 zipfile.txt.zip

If you need to change the output file name or path, then you can use the ‘dest‘ parameter to set them both. The following task will create the ‘zipfile2.zip’ in the mentioned path.

- hosts: all
  tasks:
  - name: Ansible zip file with path example
    archive:
      path: /Users/mdtutorials2/Documents/Ansible/zipfile.txt
      dest: /Users/mdtutorials2/Documents/zipfile2.zip
      format: zip

Ansible zip multiple files

You can give multiple files to be compressed as input, against the path parameter. The ‘dest’ parameter should be set to the output filename.

- hosts: all
  tasks:
  - name: Ansible zip multiple files example
    archive:
      path:
        - /Users/mdtutorials2/Documents/Ansible/zipfile.txt
        - /Users/mdtutorials2/Documents/Ansible/zipfile2.txt
        - /Users/mdtutorials2/Documents/Ansible/zipfile3.txt
      dest: /Users/mdtutorials2/Documents/multi.zip
      format: zip

Note: If you do not give the dest parameter while giving multiple files as input, then you will get the following error during execution.

"Error, must specify \"dest\" when archiving multiple files or trees"

Ansible zip directory

You can also zip entire directory using the Archive module. As with files you just need to set the directory name against path parameter. The following example will zip the test1 directory to direc.zip.

- hosts: all
  tasks:
  - name: Ansible zip directory example
    archive:
      path:
        - /Users/mdtutorials2/Documents/Ansible/test1
      dest: /Users/mdtutorials2/Documents/Ansible/direc.zip
      format: zip
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