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Ansible “Failed to create temporary directory” Error with Windows using SSH

Create c:\temp and add the vars in the post

Short version: add the vars below to inventory

This error happens because Ansible needs a temp directory when connecting with SSH. The default location is “/tmp” which makes Windows a sad panda.

You’ll need to create c:\temp on the windows host and add a few vars to your inventory file on the ansible server. The default location is /etc/ansible/hosts

sudo nano /etc/ansible/hosts

The server in this example is server2019-test which is in the windows group so I’m adding a [windows:vars] entry to set variables for the windows group
You can change the path in remote_tmp if you don’t want to use c:\temp

[windows:vars]
remote_tmp = c:\temp
become_method = runas
ansible_connection = ssh
ansible_shell_type = cmd
shell_type = cmd

Here’s how it looks after adding vars

The full error for search results

server2019-test | UNREACHABLE! => {
“changed”: false,
“msg”: “Failed to create temporary directory. In some cases, you may have been able to authenticate and did not have permissions on the target directory. Consider changing the remote tmp path in ansible.cfg to a path rooted in \”/tmp\”, for more error information use -vvv. Failed command was: ( umask 77 && mkdir -p \”` echo ~/.ansible/tmp `\”&& mkdir \”` echo ~/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1697165824.226963-30720-2470561171736 `\” && echo ansible-tmp-1697165824.226963-30720-2470561171736=\”` echo ~/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1697165824.226963-30720-2470561171736 `\” ), exited with result 1″,
“unreachable”: true
}

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