2015-10-01

ghetto_json for Ansible

ansible-ghetto-json is an ansible module for making quick edits to JSON files.

Ansible has great built-in support for ini files, but a number of more modern applications are using JSON for config files.

ghetto_json lets you make some types of edits to JSON files, and remains simple enough that it's hopefully easier just to extend than to switch to a different module, and you won't feel too guilty just copy-pasting it into your codebase.

More details are in its README, which you can view on the above github link.

It offers an interesting oppotunity to think about type conversion: JSON actually supports more types than you would normally think of; ints, floats, nulls, booleans, as well as the trusty string type. Python, which I still don't think of as a typed language, uses and honours these types in its JSON module, meaning you have to do conversion.

And, if it explicitly supports null, how do you do removals? I made up a new keyword, unset, which removes the key. Pretty ghetto.


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