ansible - delete unmanaged files from directory?

Question

I want to recursively copy over a directory and render all .j2 files in there as templates. For this I am currently using the following lines:

Answer 1

Here's something I came up with:

- template: src=/source/directory{{ item }}.j2 dest=/target/directory/{{ item }}
  register: template_results
  with_items:
    - a_list.txt
    - of_all.txt
    - templates.txt
- set_fact:
    managed_files: "{{ template_results.results|selectattr('invocation', 'defined')|map(attribute='invocation.module_args.dest')|list }}"

- debug:
    var: managed_files
    verbosity: 0

- find:
    paths: "/target/directory/"
    patterns: "*.txt"
  register: all_files
- set_fact:
    files_to_delete: "{{ all_files.files|map(attribute='path')|difference(managed_files) }}"

- debug:
    var: all_files
    verbosity: 0
- debug:
    var: files_to_delete
    verbosity: 0

- file: path={{ item }} state=absent
  with_items: "{{ files_to_delete }}"

• This generates the templates (however which way you want), and records the results in 'template_results'
• The the results are mangled to get a simple list of the "dest" of each template. Skipped templates (due to a when condition, not shown) have no "invocation" attribute, so they're filtered out.
• "find" is then used to get a list of all files that should be absent unless specifically written.
• this is then mangled to get a raw list of files present, and then the "supposed to be there" files are removed.
• The remaining "files_to_delete" are then removed.

Pros: You avoid multiple 'skipped' entries showing up during deletes.

Cons: You'll need to concatenate each template_results.results if you want to do multiple template tasks before doing the find/delete.