We use Ansible Tower for Operations to perform process restarts. If they receive an alert says a process stopped, they execute an Ansible Tower job and supply the host name and process name from the alert as "survey" variables. [A lot more happens, we don’t just blindly restart every failure.]
I want to automate this with python by taking the host name and process name from the alert, and calling the Tower template. And I want to pass the host and process name as "-e" variables, but I cannot find any documentation on how to code the "extra_vars" in python.
The portion of the playbook with the service variable looks like:
- name: Check "{{ service }}"
shell: systemctl status "{{ service }}".service | grep Active | awk -v N=2 '{print $N}'
register: output
tags: always
- name: Start "{{ service }}"
service:
name: "{{ service }}"
state: started
when: output.stdout == 'inactive'
tags: start
The relevant part of the python3 code looks like:
headers = {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}
data = see below, this is where I am stuck
response = requests.post('http://localhost/api/v2/job_templates/13/launch/', headers=headers, data =data, verify=False, auth=('user','pass')
I have tried:
data = '{"service":"apache2"}'
data = '{"variables":["service","apache2"]}
data = '{"extra_vars":["service","apache2"]}
And these all fail cause the request to fail with a 400 response.
There seem to be answers in stackoverflow for using VariableManager(), but that method seems to bypass Tower and the existing templates.
Any thoughts on how I pass "extra_vars"?
Thanks
>Solution :
Per https://docs.ansible.com/ansible-tower/latest/html/towerapi/api_ref.html#/Job_Templates/Job_Templates_job_templates_launch_create, Tower expects variables as extra_vars in the JSON body.
This attempt is the closest:
data = '{"extra_vars":["service","apache2"]}
however, you formatted it as a list of strings for some reason, instead of using the standard representation of variables as a dictionary/mapping.
data = '{"extra_vars": {"service": "apache2"}}'