What traces does Ansible leave on remote hosts and how can I remove them?

[Nick Kakouros]

I noticed that Ansible keeps a ~/.ansible directory. How can I delete it? Are there other traces of Ansible on the VM being configured?

[Daniel JD]

Ansible should cleanup the files inside that folder. It should be empty! I dont know a way to completly remove it...
You could change the path to /tmp/.ansible and then it should automatically be cleaned by the OS (because /tmp is a tmpfs which is located in DRAM or if its a normal filesystem, by a systemd.timer).

Another thing you probably want to change, set no_logs to True:

no_logs: True

which prevents ansible to write the logs in syslog.

[Daniel JD]

I forgot to tell you how to change that path :D

The option is the following:

remote_tmp = ~/.ansible/tmp

[Nick Kakouros]

Thanks for the info, I will try setting the path to /tmp/ansible.

[Brian Coca]

The no_log setting might be too much as it obscures the info on the
controller also, there is another setting that specifically prevents
writing to syslog on the remote:

no_target_syslog = False


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Brian Coca