Passing sub vars to Ansible command line - ansible

Question

I have an ansible playbook that gets its vars passed in from an extra-vars.json file. It gets passed in at the command line with --extra-vars "#extra-vars.json".
This is an abbreviated version of the var file
{
"source" : {
"access_token" : "abc",
"git_instance_url" : "foo.com",
"repo" : "some-group/some-project/some-repo"
},
"target" : {
"access_token" : "xyz",
"git_instance_url" : "foo.bar.com",
"repo_path" : "lorem/ipsum"
}
}
Because of the var structure, when I call the vars in my playbook I have to use dot notation i.e. {{ source.repo_path }} or {{ target.access_token }}. My problem is that I would like to remove a couple of these vars from the extra-vars.json and pass them individually at the command line. If I remove source.git_instance_url from extra-vars.json I can pass it in without any precedence conflicts.
My issue is that I can't figure out how to pass dot notation vars in at the command line. I don't want to change my playbook to do this. If I pass in --extra-vars "source.git_instance_url=bar.baz.com" I get an error source is undefined.
I tried using bracket notation source[git_instance_url]=bar.baz.com with no success.
Is there a way to pass dot notation vars at the command line or am I going to have to change my playbook from {{ source.git_instance_url }} ==> {{ source_git_instance_url }} to be able to accomplish this?

Answer 1

When passing extra vars, these are always "string variables". I learned it the hard way when trying to pass in boolean variables.
You could pass them as json:
ansible-playbook -e '{"source": { "git_instance_url": "foo" }}' playbook.yml
But I don't know right now, if they get merged with the source var from your vars file. I'd guess, one overwrites the other. So you probably end up with either the source var from your string or with the one from the file.