Copying with copy task folders raises IsADirectoryError

[corentincharron]

Hello,

Problem

I'm trying to use the copy task in order to copy folders, but if I provide directories to src and dest, it raises a IsADirectoryError (I'm on Linux).

This is probably not a bug for the Ansible copy task seems to be for files only.

Ansible equivalent for "copying" directories seems to be the synchronize task, which is a wrapper around rsync.

But technically it's not the same, and being able to both copy and sync directories would be very useful.

Proposal

I'm willing to give it a try myself, but I'd like your opinion first:

• Add directories support to copy task?
• Create a new task copy_dir?

Also there are two commons cases that needs to be handled:

• Copy source to destination
• Copy source's content to destination (my use case today)

Regarding preservation, there are two cases to handle as well:

• Erase destination's content first
• Merge with existing destination's content

I could also give a go to implementing asynchronize equivalent, but it's less of need for me, and it would require some more thinking for it's using os-specific commands (I believe there is a Windows equivalent to rsync though)

Thanks!

[MrFrangipane]

Hi,

Thank you for your message !

After a deeper reading of the Ansible documentation on copy, it seems that giving a folder to that task recursively copies the whole directory.

Maybe we should do the same.

Don't bother with synchronize if there is no use case :)

All the best !

[corentincharron]

Great, I'll copy their rules, they covers everything!

From Ansible:

• dest
  • If src is a directory, this must be a directory too.
  • If dest is a non-existent path and if either dest ends with "/" or src is a directory, dest is created.
• src
  • If path is a directory, it is copied recursively. In this case, if path ends with "/", only inside contents of that directory are copied to destination. Otherwise, if it does not end with "/", the directory itself with all contents is copied.

[MrFrangipane]

Wonderful !

[corentincharron]

One more question:

So far, copying does merge the source into the destination. What if I need the destination to be cleared beforehand?

• Should it be an extra flag for the task copy, like merge?
• Or would it be more canonical if I created a new task delete?

With the later, the granularity is better but my batches will be a lot more wordy.

[MrFrangipane]

The Ansible documentation states there is a force flag. This is not exactly what you want

There is also a backup that puts the previous data in a timestamped folder

Maybe a replace: yes flag could state that the dst is deleted beforehand ?

[corentincharron]

I thought about using the force flag, but this is not exactly what it means, so I'll go for the replace extra flag solution!