Using Ansible to Copy Single and Multiple Files to Target Servers

This article provides a step‑by‑step tutorial on using Ansible to copy files from a source machine to one or more target servers. It covers both the simple case of copying a single file and the more complex case of copying multiple files with a loop.

Copy a single file

The following playbook ( copy.yml ) copies /root/ansible/luyan/copymodule/copytest1.txt to /opt/copymodule on every host in the inventory. Key parameters include remote_user , src , dest , owner , group , and mode set to 755 for executable permissions.

---
- hosts: all
  remote_user: root
  gather_facts: false
  tasks:
    - name: "复制主机上的文件到目标服务器上"
      copy:
        src: "/root/ansible/luyan/copymodule/copytest1.txt"
        dest: "/opt/copymodule"
        owner: root
        group: root
        mode: 755

Copy multiple files

For copying several files, the playbook ( copyduogewenjian.yml ) uses the with_items loop. Each item defines a src and dest pair, allowing the same task to run repeatedly for different files.

---
- hosts: all
  remote_user: root
  gather_facts: false
  tasks:
    - name: "复制主机上的文件到目标服务器上"
      copy:
        src: "{{ item.src }}"
        dest: "{{ item.dest }}"
        owner: root
        group: root
        mode: 755
      with_items:
        - {src:"/root/ansible/luyan/copymodule/copytest1.txt", dest:"/opt/copymodule"}
        - {src:"/root/ansible/luyan/copymodule/copytest2.txt", dest:"/opt/copymodule"}
        - {src:"/root/ansible/luyan/copymodule/copytest3.txt", dest:"/opt/copymodule"}

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