Not possible to source .bashrc with Ansible

Question

I can ssh to the remote host and do a source /home/username/.bashrc - everything works fine. However if I do:

- name: source bashrc   sudo: no   action: command source /home/username/.bashrc 

I get:

failed: [hostname] => {"cmd": ["source", "/home/username/.bashrc"], "failed": true, "rc": 2} msg: [Errno 2] No such file or directory 

I have no idea what I'm doing wrong...

Answer 1

You have two options to use source with ansible. One is with the "shell:" command and /bin/sh (the ansible default). "source" is called "." in /bin/sh. So your command would be:

- name: source bashrc   sudo: no      shell: . /home/username/.bashrc && [the actual command you want run] 

Note you have to run a command after sourcing .bashrc b/c each ssh session is distinct - every ansible command runs in a separate ssh transaction.

Your second option is to force Ansible shell to use bash and then you can use the "source" command:

- name: source bashrc   sudo: no      shell: source /home/username/.bashrc && [the actual command you want run]   args:      executable: /bin/bash 

Finally, I'll note that you may want to actually source "/etc/profile" if you're on Ubuntu or similar, which more completely simulates a local login.

Answer 2

So command will only run executables. source per se is not an executable. (It's a builtin shell command). Is there any reason why you want to source a full environment variable?

There are other ways to include environment variables in Ansible. For example, the environment directive:

- name: My Great Playbook   hosts: all   tasks:     - name: Run my command       sudo: no       action: command <your-command>       environment:           HOME: /home/myhome 

Another way is to use the shell Ansible module:

- name: source bashrc   sudo: no   action: shell source /home/username/.bashrc && <your-command> 

or

- name: source bashrc   sudo: no      shell: source /home/username/.bashrc && <your-command> 

In these cases, the shell instance/environment will terminate once the Ansible step is run.