Ansible unarchive module error: path does not exist

I was working on deploying files to a host via Ansible’s unarchive module when I ran into an error message:

path /tmp/datafiles/ does not exist

Here’s the relevant portion of my Ansible role’s task/main.yml:

- name: copy datafiles
  unarchive:
    src: datafiles.tar.gz
    dest: /tmp
    owner: root
    group: datauser

Here’s the full result of running that task:

TASK [datafiles : copy datafiles] *******************************************************************************************************************************************
fatal: [localhost]: FAILED! => {"changed": false, "failed": true, "msg": "path /tmp/datafiles/ does not exist", "path": "/tmp/datafiles/", "state": "absent"}

The error message confused me. The datafiles directory shouldn’t need to exist!

The problem was completely unrelated to the error message. I had specified a group, datauser, that did not exist on the target host. Once I removed the group parameter, the task ran without error. (Another option would be to ensure that the specified group exists on the target host.)