Boolean variable being capitalized in templates? Best practice to work around?

[Philip Lombardi]

I have some variables defined in a role such as:

---
# file: roles/consul/defaults/main.yml
consul_server: yes

And then I have a JSON template file with many settings for the software I am provisioning, but just for example:

{
  "server": {{ consul_server | bool }}
}

When Ansible/Jinja2 process the template I end up with an invalid JSON object because 'True' is not a valid JSON keyword:

{
  "server": True
}

I ended up doing this:

{
  "server": {{ consul_server | bool | lower }}
}

Which works... but it gets sloppy when there are a ton of variables in a file.

So my question, what is the proper way to interpolate boolean values in a JSON file?

Thank you for reading. Looking forward to the response(s).

Regards,

Phil

[Tom Bamford]

Hi Phil

Don't know if there is an official short way to do this, but there is a 'to_json' filter which seems to work on simple booleans, which could be slightly preferable to 'lower'?

Tom

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[Brian Coca]

the capitalized boolean happens because this is how valid booleans
work in jinja2/python, which is what ansible uses internally.

as @tom suggested there is a to_json filter which will output correct
json from ansible data structures/variables.



--
Brian Coca

[Andrew Feller]

Maybe to_json is better than to_yaml and apparently have been superseded by to_nice_json / to_nice_yaml but the to_yaml / to_nice_yaml filters are crap, not well documented within jinja2, and require understanding the actual pyyaml library function interface to make work.  In short, all of it feels bad.