Ansible Rest Calls

Rest API’s calls are now a days the main API to integrate with different applications. If you want to connect to an existing infrastructure we can expose the infrastructure as rest API and other applications can you the API to make calls.

Ansible also provides us a way to make the Rest calls using URI module. The URI module allows us to send XML or JSON payload and get the necessary details. In this article we will see how we can use the URI module and make the Rest calls. As for the article I will be using the Nexus artifactory to connect which run on the 8081 Port. The URL are specified in the vars/main.yml file.

Make a Get Call - Using the Ansible URI module to make get call is pretty easy. We can use

- name: Maker a Call

  uri:

   url: "{{nexus_url}}/repositories"

   method: GET

   user: admin

   password: admin123

   force_basic_auth: yes

   return_content: yes

In the above snippet, I am making a Rest call to the “nexus_url/respositories” URL by passing them the user name and password along with the method as “Get” and the return_content.  We can use the Ansible debug to check the obtained response.

Make a Post call – Making a Post call needs a little extra details. Now for making a post call we need the JSON data. We can both create a file with JSON data and pass that to the file or we can include the JSON data at the same place. Lets create a JSON file first as

{

    "data": {

        "repoType": "proxy",

        "id": "somerepo1",

        "name": "Some Repo Name1",

        "browseable": true,

        "indexable": true,

        "notFoundCacheTTL": 1440,

        "artifactMaxAge": -1,

        "metadataMaxAge": 1440,

        "itemMaxAge": 1440,

        "repoPolicy": "RELEASE",

        "provider": "maven2",

        "providerRole": "org.sonatype.nexus.proxy.repository.Repository",

        "downloadRemoteIndexes": true,

        "autoBlockActive": true,

        "fileTypeValidation": true,

        "exposed": true,

        "checksumPolicy": "WARN",

        "remoteStorage": {

            "remoteStorageUrl": "http://puppet.jas.com:8081/local",

            "authentication": null,

            "connectionSettings": null

        }

    }

}

Save the file as proxy.json and move the file to the files location. Now we can use the proxy.json using the lookup in ansible as,

- name: Make a Proxy Repository

  uri:

    url: "{{ nexus_url }}/repositories"

    method: POST

    body: "{{ lookup('file','proxy.json') }}"

    user: admin

    password: admin123

    force_basic_auth: yes

    body_format: json

    HEADER_Content-Type: application/json

    HEADER_Accept: application/json,version=2

    return_content: yes

    status_code: 201

IN the above snippet I passed the JSON file an argument to the  Ansible lookup. Besides this I passed the user name , password and most importantly the body_format , Header fields etc. We also need to pass the return code of the Rest call so that Ansible will compare the return status code with the status code that we defined. In the above example I passed the status code as 201. In this case the Ansible will check the rest call status code and passed status code to check if that is success or not. Even though the rest call is success if the status codes are not same Ansible will throw an error.

If we want to pass the JSON format in the body itself without using the file, we can use

- name: Make a Hosted Repository
  uri:
    url: "{{nexus_url}}/{{ nexus_endpoint }}/{{ nexus_repositories_service }}"
    method: POST
    body: >
     {
      data: {
        "repoType": "{{ hosted_repo_data.repoType }}",
        "id": "{{ repoId }}",
        "name": "{{ repoName }}",
        "provider": "{{ repoProvider}}",
        "browseable": {{ hosted_repo_data.browseable }},
        "repoPolicy": {{ hosted_repo_data.repoPolicy }},
        "providerRole": {{ hosted_repo_data.providerRole }}
           }
     }
    user: "{{ nexus_admin }}"
    password: "{{ nexus_admin_password }}"
    force_basic_auth: yes
    body_format: json
    HEADER_Content-Type: application/json
    HEADER_Accept: application/json,version=2
    return_content: yes
    status_code: 201

The body can be added directory to the Body method in the Ansible JSON call.

That’s all about Ansible URL module and rest calls. Hope this helps.