Copy file to muliple servers

Create a inventory file

Here is an example inventory file. See below for a explantion

[app_servers] 
stapp01 ansible_host=172.16.238.10 ansible_user=tony ansible_password=Ir0nM@n 
stapp02 ansible_host=172.16.238.11 ansible_user=steve ansible_password=Am3ric@ 
stapp03 ansible_host=172.16.238.12 ansible_user=banner ansible_password=BigGr33n

---

📦 [app_servers]

This defines a group called app_servers. You can target this group in your playbooks with:

hosts: app_servers

---

🖥️ Host Entries

Each of the following lines defines a host with connection variables:

stapp01 ansible_host=172.16.238.10 ansible_user=tony ansible_password=Ir0nM@n

• stapp01 – This is the alias you're giving the host; you can refer to it this way in Ansible tasks or plays.
• ansible_host – The actual IP address or hostname to connect to.
• ansible_user – The SSH user Ansible will use to connect.
• ansible_password – The password for that user (used instead of SSH keys in this setup).

---

🔐 Quick Note on Security

Using ansible_password directly in your inventory file is totally valid for testing or simple environments — but not ideal for production. For better security, consider using Ansible Vault to encrypt the file or move credentials to a protected group_vars file.

Ansible playbook

Here’s a complete Ansible playbook to perform that file copy operation across all application servers:

---
- name: Copy index.html to all application servers
  hosts: app_servers
  become: true
  tasks:
    - name: Ensure destination directory exists
      file:
        path: /opt/security
        state: directory
        mode: '0755'

    - name: Copy index.html to /opt/security
      copy:
        src: /usr/src/security/index.html
        dest: /opt/security/index.html
        owner: "{{ ansible_host }}"
        group: "{{ ansible_host }}"
        mode: '0644'

📌 Save this as ~/ansible/playbook.yml.

Make sure your inventory file ~/ansible/inventory has the [app_servers] group defined with your application hosts.

Once done, run the playbook like this (as validation will expect):

cd ~/ansible
ansible-playbook -i inventory playbook.yml

Let me know if the file contents need to be templated or validated on the remote end — we can make it smarter if needed. 🔧📄