How to write selected values to a file from a list of JSON arrays?

[Nick Ellson]

I have a task that I am scratching my head on, and my google foo is just getting some really basic examples of the COPY - CONTENT method of writing a file.

my variable returned from the URI module is data, which is a 4 variable JSON array. data.json.devices is the list I want to dump to a file to use as my future hosts file for cli config operations.

ok: [localhost] => {

    "msg": [

        {

            "hostname": "host1", 

            "id": "0093253e", 

            "mgmtIP": "10.10.10.1"

        }, 

        {

            "hostname": "host2", 

            "id": "00e75962", 

            "mgmtIP": "10.10.10.8"

        }, 
<snip the other 378 entries in list>

I'd like to spit this to a ./inventory/hosts file in a format that my playbook can then use in the next set of tasks. So just the "hostname" and "mgmtIP" variables written to a line.

How might that look?

Nick

[Kai Stian Olstad]

You can use the template or the copy module, the jinja template code is the same in both so i just show the copy module

- name: Create inventory
copy:
content: |
{% for i in data.json.devices %}
{{ i.hostname }} ansible_host={{ i.mgmtIP }}
{% endfor %}
dest: inventory/hosts

--
Kai Stian Olstad

[Nick Ellson]

WOW!

That worked SLICK! And thank you for the much better example, that is very readable but I had a hell of a time finding anything like that on google. 

OK, so you mentions jinja... I have heard this term and I hear it is something I need to learn as well... what might this look like using jinja, if you have time? (I have a working file now, thank you very much!)

[Kai Stian Olstad]

On Saturday, 24 November 2018 20:25:15 CET Nick Ellson wrote:
> WOW!
>
> That worked SLICK! And thank you for the much better example, that is very
> readable but I had a hell of a time finding anything like that on google.
>
> OK, so you mentions jinja... I have heard this term and I hear it is
> something I need to learn as well... what might this look like using jinja,
> if you have time? (I have a working file now, thank you very much!)

The code in content: is Jinja so it look exactly like that.

Jinja is a template language for Python that Ansible is also using.
{{ <some_variable }} is actually Jinja, and everything after a when: in Ansible is Jinja.

For more information about Jinja the documentation is here
http://jinja.pocoo.org/docs/2.10/templates/


--
Kai Stian Olstad