Edit JSON config file using ansible "lineinfile" module

[Guillaume DEDRIE]

Hi,
I'm looking for some help.

I'm trying to edit with "lineinfile" module a JSON config file:

- name: Task
   lineinfile:
     dest=/etc/pkg/settings.json
     state=present
     regexp='{{ item.key }}'
     line='"{{ item.key }}": {{ item.value }}'
   with_items:
     - { key: 'setting1', value: 'true' }
     - { key: 'setting2', value: '"value2"' }

But, ansible return an error:

Note: The error may actually appear before this position: line x, column y

    regexp='{{ item.key }}'
    line='"{{ item.key }}": {{ item.value }},'
                          ^
This one looks easy to fix.  YAML thought it was looking for the start of a
hash/dictionary and was confused to see a second "{".  Most likely this was
meant to be an ansible template evaluation instead, so we have to give the
parser a small hint that we wanted a string instead. The solution here is to
just quote the entire value.

For instance, if the original line was:

    app_path: {{ base_path }}/foo

It should be written as:

    app_path: "{{ base_path }}/foo"

Ansible failed to complete successfully. Any error output should be
visible above. Please fix these errors and try again.

 

I get an hotfix, using this template of key/value format:

- {key: '"setting1":', value: true}
- {key: '"setting2":', value: '"value2"'}

 

Is there another way to do this?

Regards,
Guillaume

[Michael DeHaan]

That's quite unsafe, JSON is not line oriented.

It would probably be better to just template out the file to be like you want it to be.

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Michael DeHaan <mic...@ansibleworks.com>
CTO, AnsibleWorks, Inc.
http://www.ansibleworks.com/

[John Jarvis]

Since templating json can get messy another way to go about this is to
take your json configuration, express it as yaml in a var in ansible
and then do this in your template:

{{ app_settings | to_nice_json }}

[Guillaume DEDRIE]

Thanks Michael and John for your answers !

I'll use template module instead (you convince me !).

Thanks a lot,
Guillaume