Jinja, JSON, and uri module - having issues

[Scott Rankin]

Hey ansible community,

I'm trying to do something which I thought would be fairly straightforward, but I've run into a number of bugs/roadblocks and so I'm coming to the community for some help solving my problem.

What I'm trying to do is this: create a JSON request body and send a URI request to a server.  Here's a slimmed-down version of my playbook:

---

- hosts: 127.0.0.1

  connection: local

  vars:

    cpu_count: 3

    bar: "whooo"

    bar2: "wheee"

  tasks:

    - set_fact:

        request_body: {

          "cpus": "{{cpu_count}}",

          "mem": 1500,

          "env": {

              "FOO": "{{bar}}",

              "FOO2": "{{bar2}}",

          },

          "constraints": [["123", "456"]]

      }

    - name: Kick off app

      uri: url=http://requestb.in/1laafhn1

           method=PUT

           body='{{ request_body | to_json }}'

           HEADER_Content-Type="application/json"

           status_code=200,201,204

When I run this, I get this string posted to my RequestBin:

{"mem": 1500, "cpus": "3", "env": {"FOO": "whooo", "FOO2": "wheee"}, "constraints": [["123", "456"]]}

The problem with this is that I don't want the "cpus" variable quoted - it's an integer, and my actual target server rejects it. I believe this is a known issue (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/9362).  And no, {{cpu_count | int}} doesn't help.  It still quotes the value in the resulting JSON.  

In an attempt to work around this, I tried doing something like this:

    - set_fact:
        request_string: '{{ request_body | to_json | regex_replace("cpus.: .([0-9\\.]+).", "cpus\": \\1") }}'

    - name: Kick off app
      uri: url=http://requestb.in/1laafhn1
           method=PUT
           body='{{ request_string }}'
           HEADER_Content-Type="application/json"
           status_code=200,201,204

This has the (somewhat strange to me) effect of stripping all quotes from the value PUT on the server:

{mem: 1500, cpus: 3, env: {FOO: whooo, FOO2: wheee}, constraints: [[123, 456]]}
And changing the single quotes in the URI module to double quotes makes my JSON quoted with single quotes.  Also not helpful.  
Lastly, I've tried to use the URI module with YAML-style output: 
    - name: Kick off app
      uri: 
        url: http://requestb.in/1laafhn1
        method: PUT
        body: '{{ request_string }}'
        HEADER_Content-Type: "application/json"
        status_code: 200,201,204
This results in an ansible stack trace, which appears to be this bug: https://github.com/ansible/ansible-modules-core/issues/265
If you've read this far - I would love some alternative suggestions on how to accomplish this using Ansible. Thank you in advance! 

[Jason Edelman]

Scott,

Was there ever a response on this or a fix you found?

Thanks,
Jason