Create Ansibles remote_tmp from config file variable

Question

I want to fix the following warning by manually creating the path:

Wednesday 22 January 2020  12:50:41 +0100 (0:00:05.878)       0:20:16.431 ***** 
[WARNING]: Module remote_tmp /home/db2inst1/.ansible/tmp did not exist and was created with a mode of 0700, this may cause issues when running as another user. To avoid this, create the remote_tmp dir with the correct permissions
manually

To keep things DRY, I don't want to just use the pattern in a file directive for creation. Instead, I'd like to access the remote_tmp variable inside my playbook to dynamically fetch the path, even when it's changed by environment variables or the ansible.cfg file.

I couldn't find a documentation about this variable and tried:

- debug:
    #var: remote_tmp
    #var: hostvars[remote_tmp]
    var: ansible_remote_tmp

but always got an error that the variable is not defined.

How can I get the remote_tmp variable from the config inside a playbook?

Answer 1

Please see below, if this is what you are looking for.

---
- hosts: "localhost"
  tasks:
  - name: ansible conf file
    shell: cat /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg | grep remote_tmp | awk '{print $3}'
    register: remote_tmp
  - name: print
    debug:
     msg: "{{remote_tmp.stdout}}"

Output:

TASK [print] 
****************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
    "msg": "~/.ansible/tmp"
}

Answer 2

As far as I understand you just have to define

allow_world_readable_tmpfiles: true in your vars.yml file, so somehow this solution works in my case.

Answer 3

Yes, there is no way to access the remote_tmp value directly as you can with other variables from Ansible.

I confirmed this by dumping all variables with -vvv -m setup. There is no remote_tmp in the output.

This is with Ansible 2.10.x

My guess is this is because remote_tmp is Ansible's temp directory for Ansible's internal use. Not for us to store things in it. :) Because Ansible cleans up after itself but it wouldn't know to clean up our files.

Nevertheless, you could open an issue requesting to see the value of remote_tmp as an Ansible variable at https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/new/choose

Also, that warning isn't anything to worry about -- Ansible is just letting you know it created a temp directory that's only writable by that user. That is a responsible and secure thing to do. Unless you have specific use case that requires different permissions on the remote_tmp directory, the default is most likely fine!