CODEWITHSUNDEEP
amazon-web-servicesansible
tman
tman

Reputation: 425

In Ansible can I pass a dictionary to a cloud module as a variable

I am using the ec2_asg cloud module in ansible to update an Auto-Scaling group. I am trying to make this a role so I can apply this to multiple playbooks, and I was wondering if could pass in the tags values as variables.

Without variables the asg task looks like:

ec2_asg:
  name: "test_app"    
  tags:
    - Environment: Production
    - Name: test_app

And I know I could also do:

ec2_asg:
  name: {{asg_name}}"
  tags:
    - Environment: "{{asg_tag_env}}"
    - Name: "{{asg_tag_name}}"

But I'm curious if in my group_vars I can pass all of the tagging info in as a var, i.e.

asg_tags: "{'tags': {'Environment': Production, 'Name': test_app}}" #option1

or

asg_tags: "{'Environment': Production, 'Name': test_app}" #option2

When I try can call that in the ec2_asg module via

 #option1
 ec2_asg
   name: "{{asg_name}}"
   "{{asg_tags}}"

this doesn't seem to work, as the module doesn't understand the root index of the dictionary is the tags option you specify in the ec2_asg module.
I just get a syntax error while loading YAML.

and if I try

 #option2
 ec2_asg
   name: "{{asg_name}}"
   tags: "{{asg_tags}}"

I get back an error from ansible stating:
for k,v in tag.items():\nAttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'items'\n"

Either this isn't supported, or I'm not sure how to structure the variable so the ec2_asg module reads in the tags correctly and knows how to apply them.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 3032

Answers (1)

larsks
larsks

Reputation: 312098

First, note that that the values of tags is a list of dictionaries, each with a single key:

tags:
  - Environment: Production
  - Name: test_app

If you paste that into a YAML parser like this one you'll see that the corresponding JSON is:

{
  "tags": [
    {
      "Environment": "Production"
    }, 
    {
      "Name": "test_app"
    }
  ]
}

So whatever value you assign to a variable it will need to be a similar list.

I'm not able to test out the ec2* modules myself at the moment, but if you define a variable appropriately, like this:

asg_tags:
  - Environment: Production
  - Name: test_app

Or alternately (although I find the former easier toread):

asg_tags: [{"Environment": "Production"}, {"Name": "test_app"}]

You should then be able to do:

- ec2_asg:
    name: "test_app"    
    tags: "{{ asg_tags }}"

Upvotes: 3

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