Execute .exe on Windows with Ansible

Question

We want to deploy an application on a Windows Server 2012 with Ansible 1.8.2.

I have searched and found a list of modules for Windows. Is there a module to execute a .exe?

Did someone already launch a .exe on Windows with Ansible?

Answer 1

The raw module can work, as others have suggested. One challenge is that it won't "know" if the executable has already been run before. In combination with the win_stat module and the when conditional, you can build a script that detects if something has been installed and runs if not installed. For example, I wanted to install the MSBuild development tools:

- name: Check to see if MSBuild is installed
  win_stat: path='C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\12.0\Bin\MSBuild.exe'
  register: msbuild_installed
- name: Download MS Build Tools 2013
  win_get_url:
    url: 'http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/B/B/9BB1309E-1A8F-4A47-72A3B3/BuildTools_Full.exe'
    dest: 'c:\temp\BuildTools_Full.exe'
  when: not msbuild_installed.stat.exists
- name: Install MS Build Tools 2013
  raw: 'c:\temp\BuildTools_Full.exe /Quiet /NoRestart /Full'
  when: not msbuild_installed.stat.exists

Note that I found the command line arguments for BuildTools_Full.exe by manually running

.\BuildTools_Full.exe /h