Copy local file to remote AWS EC2 instance with Ansible - amazon-web-services

Question

I'm attempting to build an AWS AMI using both Packer and Ansible to provision my AMI. I'm getting stuck on being able to copy some local files to my newly spun up EC2 instance using Ansible. I'm using the copy module in Ansible to do this. Here's what my Ansible code looks like:
- name: Testing copy of the local remote file
copy:
src: /tmp/test.test
dest: /tmp
Here's the error I get:
amazon-ebs: TASK [Testing copy of the local remote file] ***********************************
amazon-ebs: fatal: [127.0.0.1]: FAILED! => {"changed": false, "failed": true, "msg": "Unable to find '/tmp/test.test' in expected paths."}
I've verified that the file /tmp/test.test exists on my local machine from which Ansible is running.
For my host file I just have localhost in it since packer is telling Ansible everything it needs to know about where to run Ansible commands.
I'm not sure where to go from here or how to properly debug this error, so I'm hoping for a little help.
Here's what my Packer script looks like:
{
"variables": {
"aws_access_key": "{{env `access_key`}}",
"aws_secret_key": "{{env `secret_key`}}"
},
"builders": [{
"type": "amazon-ebs",
"access_key": "{{user `aws_access_key`}}",
"secret_key": "{{user `aws_secret_key`}}",
"region": "us-east-1",
"source_ami": "ami-116d857a",
"instance_type": "t2.micro",
"ssh_username": "admin",
"ami_name": "generic_jenkins_image",
"ami_description": "Testing AMI building with Packer",
"vpc_id": "xxxxxxxx",
"subnet_id": "xxxxxxxx",
"associate_public_ip_address": "true",
"tags": {"Environment" : "Dev", "Product": "SharedOperations"}
}],
"provisioners": [
{
"type": "shell",
"inline": [
"sleep 30",
"sudo rm -f /var/lib/dpkg/lock",
"sudo apt-get update -y --fix-missing",
"sudo apt-get -y install libpq-dev python-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libldap2-dev libsasl2-dev libffi-dev gcc build-essential python-pip",
"sudo pip install ansible"
]
},
{
"type": "ansible-local",
"playbook_file": "ansible/main.yml"
}
]
}
And here's my entire Ansible file:
---
- hosts: all
sudo: yes
tasks:
- name: Testing copy of the local remote file
copy:
src: /tmp/test.test
dest: /tmp

Answer 1

You are using ansible-local provisioner which runs the playbooks directly on targets ("local" in HashiCorp's products like Vagrant, Packet is used to describe the point of view of the provisioned machine).
The target does not have the /tmp/test.test file, hence you get the error.
You actually want to run the playbook using the regular Ansible provisioner.