Ansible pass json in varibale in ansible-playbook --extra-vars= - json

Question

i try to pass JSON structure into ansible-playbook without success:
this is the command I try to pass
ansible-playbook --extra-vars='[{\"${foo1}\": \"somevalue1\", \"${foo2}\": \"somevalue2\"}, {\"${zoo1}\": \"somevalue111\", \"${zoo2}\": \"somevalue222\"}]' test.yml
getting error:
ERROR! Syntax Error while loading YAML.
expected ',' or '}', but got '{'
or this :
ansible-playbook --extra-vars='[{"${foo1}":"somevalue1","${foo2}":"somevalue2"},{"${zoo1}":"somevalue111","${zoo2}":"somevalue222"}]' test.yml
Getting no output
The ideal way is passing the JSON into variable like this so i could iterate the json array in ansible :
ansible-playbook --extra-vars="AAA='[{\"${foo1}\": \"somevalue1\", \"${foo2}\": \"somevalue2\"}, {\"${zoo1}\": \"somevalue111\", \"${zoo2}\": \"somevalue222\"}]'" test.yml
with this playbook :
---
-
gather_facts: false
hosts: localhost
name: test
tasks:
- name: debug
debug:
msg: "{{ AAA }}"
The output is :
ok: [localhost] =>
msg:
- ? ''
: somevalue2
- ? ''
: somevalue222
In short, what is the best way to pass JSON structure into ansible without using the file?

Answer 1

I don't follow why you're escaping the " inside of a ' string, but you will want to switch away from the KEY=VALUE syntax because in that form, ansible splits on whitespace -- by leading with the { it informs ansible that the --extrav-vars is in fact JSON and stops using the key-value parser
ansible -e '{"AAA": [{"hello":{"world": true}}, {"array":{"yup":"forsure"}}]}' -m debug -a var=AAA localhost
produces
localhost | SUCCESS => {
"AAA": [
{
"hello": {
"world": true
}
},
{
"array": {
"yup": "forsure"
}
}
]
}