So today I was trying to fix a problem with the deployment of some software with Ansible. I am using get_url in combination with a http_proxy environment setting in order to pull a file in from a HTTP URL. However, when I ran the playbook I was greeted with a [Errno 111] Connection refused error message. After fixing the proxy to have the netblock properly configured I tested again and was again greeted by the error. The problem became more confounding when I ran a test with curl on the command line using the proxy parameters, this test actually worked. So the proxy was running as it should. After some long testing and trying to figure out just what was going wrong, I replaced the get_url with a command: curl set up to test if it might be Ansible itself. The output of curl was enlightening, it turned out the HTTP URL was 301 redirecting to another HTTP URL, which in turn was 302 redirecting to a HTTPS URL! And since I wanted to be explicit I had not added the https_proxy environment variable.

The problem however now comes in how to to fix this. Is it documentation? Ansible code fix? Python code fix?