Ansible Troubleshooting: Resolving the “Invalid Argument” Error

Unraveling the Mystery of the “Invalid Argument” Error with Ansible’s File Module

Introduction

Welcome to another episode of Ansible Pilot! I’m Luca Berton, and today we’ll delve into Ansible troubleshooting, focusing on the infamous “Invalid Argument” error. This error commonly occurs when using the Ansible file module to create a symlink in a Linux environment. Let's explore how to reproduce, troubleshoot, and fix this issue.

The Demo

To better understand Ansible troubleshooting, let’s dive into a live demo. We’ll create a playbook (invalidargument_error.yml) that attempts to create a symbolic link using the file module. In this example, we're trying to symlink /proc/cpuinfo to ~/example.

---
- name: file module demo
  hosts: all
  vars:
    mylink: "~/example"
    mysrc: "/proc/cpuinfo"
  tasks:
    - name: Creating a symlink
      ansible.builtin.file:
        path: "{{ mylink }}"
        dest: "{{ mysrc }}"
        state: link

Executing this playbook (ansible-playbook -i virtualmachines/demo/inventory troubleshooting/invalidargument_error.yml)…