Ansible Collection - thoteam.var_as_file

Ansible Collection - thoteam.var_as_file

DISCLAIMER

This is an ongoing and alpha stage work. It has not yet been tested in a lot of situations and might suffer from bugs making it unusable with some existing ansible modules. More over (see Security below), it is not compatible with ansible concurrent use yet and some data currently persisted on disk should probably be stored elsewhere. Use at your own risk

Description

This work was inspired by a question asked on StackOverflow. The goal was to

provide a mechanism to automatically transform a variable to a file with its content
return the file name so it can be used in any place a file is expected
clean-up after running the playbook all files that were created
and of course, first and foremost, have some fun while learning something new

Technical details

The collection contains 2 plugins

thoteam.var_as_file.var_as_file lookup plugin

The lookup plugin receives the content and creates a temporary file with it using the python method tempfile.mkstemp()
The content is sha256 hashed. This hash is used to reference the above file path in a dictionnary which is persisted on disk as json in a static file (currently /tmp/var_as_file_track.json).
When a new content is asked as file, if it has already, the corresponding file exists and its content has the same hash, its path is returned. Else it is deleted prior to be recreated.

thoteam.var_as_file.clean_var_as_file callback plugin

That one is responsible for cleaning up. It listens to the v2_playbook_on_stats callback event and

deletes all files references in the json tracking file
deletes the tracking file

Security

Content files are created via tempfile.mkstemp and should be rather secure (accessible to user only, created with a random name, cleared after playbook run)

There are still some concerns:

Storing the file list as a json static file is not ideal (although the content files should be rather secure). This won't work in multiple user and/or concurrent ansible run scenarii (@todo: find a way to store that info in some ansible cache / stat / fact)
We launch cleanup on stats phase. What happens if ansible crashes before?

Installing the collection

From the latest version uploaded to galaxy

ansible-galaxy collection install thoteam.var_as_file

Or directly from the git repository

ansible-galaxy collection install git+https://github.com/ansible-ThoTeam/thoteam.var_as_file.git,main

Configuring ansible to run the callback

Note:

the lookup plugin will run without any problem without the callback enabled. But the temporary files will remain on disk and the tracking files will be left intact. If you enable the callback at a later stage, it will clean-up all the existing files it can find.
although the callback should be enabled by default, it looks like it does not work for those bundled in a collection. so enabling is necessary.

To enable the callback, add it to the list of callbacks_enabled in ansible.cfg

callbacks_enabled=thoteam.var_as_file.clean_var_as_file

Note: if you had an other plugin up there, add all existing separated by a coma.

Testing with the collection test playbook

First make sure the track file does not exist. If it does, delete it

$ ls /tmp/var_as_file_track.json
ls: cannot access '/tmp/var_as_file_track.json': No such file or directory

Run the test playbook provided in the collection. It will only use the lookup plugin to use a var as file and show its content
```
ansible-playbook thoteam.var_as_file.test
```
Upon sucessful completion of the playbook, repeat step1 to make sure the tracking file was removed (and the corresponding temporary files)

Using the lookup in your own playbook

You can use the lookup as a jinja2 template for any other variable or directly as an entry to a module parameter.

Here is an extract of the examples in the inline doc (auto-generated one day maybe....):

- name: Get a filename with the given content for later use
  ansible.builtin.set_fact:
    my_tmp_file: "{{ lookup('thoteam.var_as_file.var_as_file', some_variable) }}"
    
- name: Use in place in a module where a file is mandatory and you have the content in a var
  community.general.java_cert:
    pkcs12_path: "{{ lookup('thoteam.var_as_file.var_as_file', pkcs12_store_from_vault) }}"
    cert_alias: default
    keystore_path: /path/to/my/keystore.jks
    keystore_pass: changeit
    keystore_create: yes
    state: present

Licence and copyright

About

Ansible collection holding the var_as_file utility

GNU General Public License v3.0

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