Making Ansible Keys more useful in complex and nested data structures

One of the things I miss about Jekyll when I’m working with Ansible is the ability to fragment my data across multiple files, but still have it as a structured *whole* at the end.

For example, given the following directory structure in Jekyll:

+ _data
|
+---+ members
|   +--- member1.yml
|   +--- member2.yml
|
+---+ groups
    +--- group1.yml
    +--- group2.yml

The content of member1.yml and member2.yml will be rendered into site.data.members.member1 and site.data.members.member2 and likewise, group1 and group2 are loaded into their respective variables.

This kind of structure isn’t possible in Ansible, because all the data files are compressed into one vars value that we can read. To work around this on a few different projects I’ve worked on, I’ve ended up doing the following:

- set_fact:
    my_members: |-
      [
        {%- for var in vars | dict2items -%}
          {%- if var.key | regex_search(my_regex) is not none -%}
            "{{ var.key | regex_replace(my_regex, '') }}": 
              {%- if var.value | string %}"{% endif -%}
              {{ var.value }}
              {%- if var.value | string %}"{% endif %},
          {%- endif -%}
        {%- endfor -%}
      ]
  vars:
    my_regex: '^member_'

So, what this does is to step over all the variables defined (for example, in host_vars\*, group_vars\*, from the gathered facts and from the role you’re in – following Ansible’s loading precedence), and then checks to see whether the key of that variable name (e.g. “member_i_am_a_member” or “member_1”) matches the regular expression (click here for more examples). If it does, the key (minus the regular expression matching piece [using regex_replace]) is added to a dictionary, and the value attached. If the value is actually a string, then it wraps it in quotes.

So, while this doesn’t give me my expressive data structure that Jekyll does (no site.data.members.member1.somevalue for me), I do at least get to have my_members.member1.somevalue if I put the right headers in! :)

I’ll leave extending this model for doing other sorts of building variables out (for example, something like if var.value['variable_place'] | default('') == 'my_members.member' + current_position) to the reader to work out how they could use something like this in their workflows!

Featured image is “Key mess” by “Alper Çuğun” on Flickr and is released under a CC-BY license.