JSON output for `ansible-playbook --list-tags`

[sebhoss]

SUMMARY

Using ansible.posix.json should work for ansible-playbook --list-tags as well in order to write the output of that call in JSON format to stdout.

ISSUE TYPE

• Feature Idea

COMPONENT NAME

plugins/callback/json

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

I'd like to have JSON output in order to build some scripting around ansible-playbook --list-tags.

[pyhedgehog]

Don't you just convert YAML to JSON?

ansible -i localhost, -c local all -o -m debug -a var=out -e 'out={{(lookup("file","site.yml")|from_yaml|first).tasks|map(attribute="name")|to_json}}'|sed -ne 's/^localhost[^{]*{/{/p'|jq '.out|fromjson'

[sebhoss]

Yeah kinda but I need Ansible to provide me with all the tags of all tasks found in all referenced roles as well instead of just parsing a single YAML file. Your snippet is basically just doing yq '...' site.yml but that does not consider the task YAML files of the various roles. ansible-playbook --list-tags shows all these tasks with their tags.

As an example my site.yml looks like this:

- hosts: control_plane
  roles:
    - { role: control-plane, tags: [control-plane] }

ansible-playbook --list-tags provides me with this:

playbook: site.yml

  play #1 (control_plane): control_plane    TAGS: []
      TASK TAGS: [lots, of, tags, are, listed, here, control-plane, and, even, more, after, the, break]

Your snippet gives me

[
  {
    "hosts": "control_plane",
    "roles": [
      {
        "role": "control-plane",
        "tags": [
          "control-plane"
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
]

I want all the tags in the JSON structure as well.

[sebhoss]

Oh I just realised that I wrote --list-tasks in the initial description but meant to write --list-tags - sorry for the confusion!

[bcoca]

the --list-X are hardcoded in core, the callbacks do not have the ability to change this output.

This is a feature in my wish list to change it to callback handled output, in any case this should be a feature request in https://github.com/ansible/ansible.

I was working on this as part of https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/80637, but this is not planned and on the back-burner for now.

[Akasurde]

Closing as per the above comment.