How do i specify extravars to be read from a file when running ad-hoc with `.run()`?

[nautics889]

Ansible provides feature when extra variables can be loaded from file. So, let's suppose, i have some_file.yaml and i want to display variable from the file using shell module. That's going to be something like this:

(venv) nautics@DESKTOP-09RDHU4:~/workspace/ansible_sandbox$ ansible localhost -m ansible.builtin.shell -e "@some_file.yaml" -a 'echo "{{ foobar }}"'
[WARNING]: No inventory was parsed, only implicit localhost is available
localhost | CHANGED | rc=0 >>
test variable

---

How can i make exactly the same in a context of Python?

I tried to make something like below passing "@some_file.yaml" as an extravars, but it's failing:

>>> ansible_runner.run(host_pattern='localhost', module='ansible.builtin.shell', module_args="echo '{{ foobar }}'", extravars='@some_file.yaml')
[WARNING]: No inventory was parsed, only implicit localhost is available
usage: ansible [-h] [--version] [-v] [-b] [--become-method BECOME_METHOD]
...
Some actions do not make sense in Ad-Hoc (include, meta, etc)
ERROR! Invalid extra vars data supplied. '@/tmp/tmp7j7lw95h/env/extravars' could not be made into a dictionary
<ansible_runner.runner.Runner object at 0x7f6344dee980>

According to the log, runner tries to read data from some temporary file: /tmp/tmp7j7lw95h/env/extravars. Is this correct behavior?

Futhermore, according to docstring of .run() method the argument extravars can be dict and only dict instance.

---

I've found there was a similar issue (https://github.com/ansible/ansible-runner/issues/303) and related PR was merged long time ago, but i'm still not following how would i set extra variables to be read from a file. I've also tried to use full path like extravars="/full/path/to/some_file.yaml" — same.

---

WAIDW?

[muety]

Passing a full file path (like /tmp/some_file.yml) as the extravars argument worked for me.

But the implementation of this is super weird. Instead of directly passing that string as a process argument, the file path is written to env/extravars (now containing a plain string instead of YAML data) and then read from there. I also tried using the cmdline argument, but even there, a env/cmdline file is created.

There seems to be no way to not do a filesystem round trip, which is super annoying, because it seems inefficient and could cause race conditions when trying to run multiple Ansible processes in parallel.

---

Futhermore, according to docstring of .run() method the argument extravars can be dict and only dict instance.

Yep, docs are wrong here. Got confused by this as well.

[nautics889]

@muety thank you and apologies for late reply.

The option with full path worked for me as well.

I guess the issue can be closed for now, perharps it should be mentioned somewhen if somebody wants to refactor current implemention of handling of extravars.