Ansible unarchive: "Failed to find handler"

Question

When I unarchive a file with Ansible, the following error occurred:

Failed to find handler to unarchive. Make sure the required command to extract the file is installed.

Is there a solution without installing the required modules (gtar / unzip).

Answer 1

No. Ansible is no magic, it is an automation tool which relies on commonly available tools to perform its tasks.

Per unarchive documentation:

requires gtar/unzip command on target host

If you look at the source, it looks for gtar (preferred) then tar and unzip.

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You can always use command / shell modules to run any command you like, but still you'd need programs to extract from the archives on the target machine.

Answer 2

The same message might be output even if the source file type is not a compressed file.