ansible.builtin.slurp module – Slurps a file from remote nodes

Note

This module is part of ansible-core and included in all Ansible installations. In most cases, you can use the short module name slurp even without specifying the collections keyword. However, we recommend you use the Fully Qualified Collection Name (FQCN) ansible.builtin.slurp for easy linking to the module documentation and to avoid conflicting with other collections that may have the same module name.

Synopsis

  • This module works like ansible.builtin.fetch. It is used for fetching a base64- encoded blob containing the data in a remote file.

  • This module is also supported for Windows targets.

Parameters

Parameter

Comments

armor

boolean

added in ansible-core 2.21

To safely deliver the data requested, armor it by base64 encoding it.

This is mainly done to avoid issues with binary data or to preserve non-UTF-8 encodings, as the content will be converted to UTF-8 due to the JSON transport used.

For windows support, check the ansible.windows collection.

Choices:

  • false

  • true ← (default)

src

aliases: path

path / required

The file on the remote system to fetch. This must be a file, not a directory.

Attributes

Attribute

Support

Description

check_mode

Support: full

Can run in check_mode and return changed status prediction without modifying target, if not supported the action will be skipped.

diff_mode

Support: none

Will return details on what has changed (or possibly needs changing in check_mode), when in diff mode

platform

Platforms: posix, windows

Target OS/families that can be operated against

Notes

Note

  • This module returns an ‘in memory’ base64 encoded version of the file, take into account that this will require at least twice the RAM as the original file size.

See Also

See also

ansible.builtin.fetch

Fetch files from remote nodes.

Examples

- name: Find out what the remote machine's mounts are
  ansible.builtin.slurp:
    src: /proc/mounts
  register: mounts

- name: Print returned information
  ansible.builtin.debug:
    msg: "{{ mounts['content'] | b64decode }}"

- name: Find out what the remote machine's mounts are, no armor
  ansible.builtin.slurp:
    src: /proc/mounts
    armor: false
  register: mounts

- name: Print returned information
  ansible.builtin.debug:
    msg: "{{ mounts['content'] }}"

# From the commandline, find the pid of the remote machine's sshd
# $ ansible host -m ansible.builtin.slurp -a 'src=/var/run/sshd.pid'
# host | SUCCESS => {
#     "changed": false,
#     "content": "MjE3OQo=",
#     "encoding": "base64",
#     "source": "/var/run/sshd.pid"
# }
# $ echo MjE3OQo= | base64 -d
# 2179

Return Values

Common return values are documented here, the following are the fields unique to this module:

Key

Description

content

string

Encoded file content

Returned: success

Sample: "MjE3OQo="

encoding

string

Current encoding of the file content, it can be base64 or UTF-8 depending on the value of the armor option.

Returned: success

Sample: "base64"

source

string

Actual path of file slurped

Returned: success

Sample: "/var/run/sshd.pid"

Authors

  • Ansible Core Team

  • Michael DeHaan (@mpdehaan)