Ansible Set variable to file content

Question

I m using the ec2 module with ansible-playbook I want to set a variable to the contents of a file  Here s how I m currently doing it     Var with the filename shell task to cat the file use the result of the cat to pass to the ec2 module    Example contents of my playbook   vars    amazon linux ami   ami-fb8e9292    user data file   base-ami-userdata sh  tasks  - name  user data contents   shell  cat    user data file      register  user data action - name  launch ec2-instance   local action        user data      user data action stdout       I assume there s a much easier way to do this  but I couldn t find it while searching Ansible docs

User · Answer

You can use fetch module to copy files from remote hosts to local  and lookup module to read the content of fetched files

User · Answer

lookup only works on localhost  If you want to retrieve variables from a variables file you made remotely use include vars     varfile      Contents of    varfile    should be a dictionary of the form    key   value    you will find ansible gives you trouble if you include a space after the colon

User · Answer

You can use lookups in Ansible in order to get the contents of a file  e g   user data      lookup  file   user data file        Caveat  This lookup will work with local files  not remote files   Here s a complete example from the docs   - hosts  all   vars       contents      lookup  file     etc foo txt         tasks       - debug  msg  the value of foo txt is    contents

User · Answer

You can use the slurp  module to fetch a file from the remote host   Thanks to  mlissner for suggesting it  vars    amazon linux ami   quot ami-fb8e9292 quot    user data file   quot base-ami-userdata sh quot  tasks  - name  Load data   slurp      src   quot    user data file    quot    register  slurped user data - name  Decode data and store as fact   You can skip this if you want to use the right hand side directly      set fact      user data   quot    slurped user data content   b64decode    quot

[ansible] Ansible: Set variable to file content

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