fetching multiple files from a host based on a naming pattern with Ansible

Question

I have a folder on a remote that looks like this.

> ls -la
-rw-rw-r--. 1 postgres postgres  469 15. Aug 12:37 220815.sql
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 postgres postgres   82 30. Dez 2015  client-postgres
-rw-------. 1 postgres postgres 2327 16. Sep 14:26 logfile
-rw-rw-r--. 1 postgres postgres    0 10. Aug 08:46 new_bindir
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 postgres postgres  497  2. Mär 2021  .pg.env
-rw-------. 1 postgres postgres  680 16. Sep 13:07 .pg-service10.env
-rw-------. 1 postgres postgres  680 16. Sep 13:08 .pg-service11.env
-rw-------. 1 postgres postgres  680 16. Sep 16:25 .pg-service15.env
-rw-------. 1 postgres postgres  708 16. Sep 11:27 .pg-service_name.env
-rw-------. 1 postgres postgres  692 16. Sep 12:36 .pg-servicename.env
-rw-------. 1 postgres postgres 1050 16. Sep 11:27 .pg-service_name.env.bak
-rw-r--r--. 1 postgres postgres  797 18. Okt 2021  postgresql_rpm.service
-rw-r--r--. 1 postgres postgres  855 28. Okt 2021  postgresql.service

now I need to fetch all files from that folder matching the .pg-*.service pattern (resulting into fetching 6 files as per this example). The playbook is runnning against a single host.

however it looks as the logig as i.e. a locale cat (cat pg*.env) is not interpreted right by ansible. and the below does not work because a file named /opt/db/postgres/bin/.pg*env does not exist.

- name: fetch all .env files to fetched
  ansible.builtin.fetch:
    src: /opt/db/postgres/bin/.pg*env
    dest: fetched/
    flat: true
  become: yes

I can not use a loop because i can not predict the explicit file names. I only know their names follow that pattern mentioned above.

What is the trick here?

Answer 1

This is how I made this work (with a lot of help from the Ansible mailing list (including @Vladimir Botka)) in 3 steps

1. finding all relevant files (find module)
2. creating a list of these findings (set_fact)
3. fetching he files based on that list (fetch module)

- name: finding all .pg-*.env files on the server
  ansible.builtin.find:
    paths: "/opt/db/postgres/bin"
    hidden: true
    recurse: true
    file_type: any
    patterns: '.pg*env'
  register: found_files
  become: true

- name: creating a list with the filenames
  set_fact:
    env_files: "{{ found_files.files | map(attribute='path') }}"

- name: fetch all .env files to fetched, based on the list created above
  ansible.builtin.fetch:
    src: "/opt/db/postgres/bin/{{ item }}"
    dest: fetched/
    flat: true
  become: yes
  loop: "{{ found_files.files | map(attribute='path') | map('basename') | list }}"