Linux – Is the SSH SFTP subsystem required on the managed nodes for Ansible to work

ansiblelinuxsftpssh

When I run:

ansible all -a "/bin/echo hello" -u myuser

I get back:

mydomain.myhost.com | FAILED => failed to open a SFTP connection (Channel closed.)

The SFTP subsystem is disabled on the managed node I'm trying to connect to.

Is SFTP required on the managed nodes? The Ansible docs don't mention SFTP specifically: http://docs.ansible.com/intro_installation.html#managed-node-requirements

I tried setting this value in ansible.cfg:

scp_if_ssh=True

…but it had no effect. (Thanks to Fred the Magic Wonder Dog for the suggestion.)

I also ensured that my non-interactive shell doesn't produce any output as suggested here.

Best Answer

Yes, ansible depends on being able to transfer files to the remote machine. It uses sftp to do this by default. You can override this to use scp using 

scp_if_ssh
Occasionally users may be managing a remote system that doesn’t have SFTP enabled. If set to True, we can cause scp to be used to transfer remote files instead:

scp_if_ssh=False
There’s really no reason to change this unless problems are encountered, and then there’s also no real drawback to managing the switch. Most environments support SFTP by default and this doesn’t usually need to be changed.

The above information was taken from this page:

http://docs.ansible.com/intro_configuration.html#openssh-specific-settings

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