Double quotes in pillar list gets converted to single quote in jinja template

[KIRAN PRANEETH]

Hello People,

I am trying to understand the encoding/string interpolation aspects from salt pillar to jinja template. All I am trying to do is specify double quotes in pillar for a list of strings but they end up with single quote when rendered in jinja template. I tried adding extra double quotes by escaping them but it still ends up in single quotes. Could you let me know what would be a immediate remediation?

Pillar:

blahblah:

cluster:

    servers: ["10.xx.xx.xx", "10.xx.xx.xx"]

Sls:

{% for host, settings in salt["pillar.get"]("blahblah:cluster", {}).iteritems() %}

servers: {{settings['servers']}}

Jinja:

{% if servers is defined %}

    "start_join": {{servers}}

Result:

"start_join": ['10.xx.xx.xx', '10.xx.xx.xx']

[Seth House]

The workflow goes roughly like this:

1. You create a list of strings in YAML syntax.
2. That is parsed into a Python list of strings and shipped to the Minion.
3. The Jinja templating engine's job is to produce a string and so it
casts that list object to a string using the normal Python mechanism
which uses single quotes. Example:

% python -c 'print ["foo", "bar"]'
['foo', 'bar']

You can use Jinja to manually build a string of double-quoted,
comma-separated strings from your list by looping over it or possibly
by using Python's ''.join() method. But a quicker way for this
use-case is to just take advantage of the fact that JSON also uses
double-quotes when it serializes a data structure to a string. :-)

This should result in what you want:

"start_join": {{ servers | json() }}

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[KIRAN PRANEETH]

| json() worked like a charm. Thanks Seth

[Nicholas Capo]

I would also recommend using `file.serialize` with `- formatter: json` instead of `file.managed`.

You can still do you jinja conditionals, just in the state file instead of the template.

Nicholas