Finding file name in files section of current Ansible role

Question

I'm fairly new to Ansible and I'm trying to create a role that copies a file to a remote server. The local file can have a different name every time I'm running the playbook, but it needs to be copied to the same name remotely, something like this:

- name: copy file
  copy:
    src=*.txt
    dest=/path/to/fixedname.txt

Ansible doesn't allow wildcards, so when I wrote a simple playbook with the tasks in the main playbook I could do:

- name: find the filename
    connection: local
    shell: "ls -1 files/*.txt"
    register: myfile

- name: copy file
  copy:
    src="files/{{ item }}"
    dest=/path/to/fixedname.txt
  with_items:
   - myfile.stdout_lines

However, when I moved the tasks to a role, the first action didn't work anymore, because the relative path is relative to the role while the playbook executes in the root dir of the 'roles' directory. I could add the path to the role's files dir, but is there a more elegant way?

Answer 1

Just wanted to throw in an additional answer... I have the same problem as you, where I build an ansible bundle on the fly and copy artifacts (rpms) into a role's files folder, and my rpms have versions in the filename.

When I run the ansible play, I want it to install all rpms, regardless of filenames.

I solved this by using the with_fileglob mechanism in ansible:

- name: Copy RPMs
  copy: src="{{ item }}" dest="{{ rpm_cache }}"
  with_fileglob: "*.rpm"
  register: rpm_files

- name: Install RPMs
  yum: name={{ item }} state=present
  with_items: "{{ rpm_files.results | map(attribute='dest') | list }}"

I find it a little bit cleaner than the lookup mechanism.