Post Json to API via Ansible - ansible

Question

I want to make a POST request to an API endpoint via Ansible where some of the items inside the post data are dynamic, here is what I try and fail:
My body_content.json:
{
apiKey: '{{ KEY_FROM_VARS }}',
data1: 'foo',
data2: 'bar'
}
And here is my Ansible task:
# Create an item via API
- uri: url="http://www.myapi.com/create"
method=POST return_content=yes HEADER_Content-Type="application/json"
body="{{ lookup('file','create_body.json') | to_json }}"
Sadly this doesn't work:
failed: [localhost] => {"failed": true}
msg: this module requires key=value arguments
....
FATAL: all hosts have already failed -- aborting
My ansible version is 1.9.1

Answer 1

You can't use newlines like this in yaml. Try this instead (the ">" indicates that the next lines are to be concatenated):
# Create an item via API
- uri: >
url="http://www.myapi.com/create"
method=POST return_content=yes HEADER_Content-Type="application/json"
body="{{ lookup('file','create_body.json') | to_json }}"
But I find this much better:
# Create an item via API
- uri:
url: "http://www.myapi.com/create"
method: POST
return_content: yes
HEADER_Content-Type: "application/json"
body: "{{ lookup('file','create_body.json') | to_json }}"

Answer 2

I'm posting below what I ended up using for my usecase (Ansible 2.0). This is useful if your json payload is stated inline (and not in a file).
this task expects 204 as its success return code.
And since the body_format is json, the header is inferred automatically
- name: add user to virtual host
uri:
url: http://0.0.0.0:15672/api/permissions/{{ rabbit_virtualhost }}/{{ rabbit_username }}
method: PUT
user: "{{ rabbit_username }}"
password: "{{ rabbit_password }}"
return_content: yes
body: {"configure":".*","write":".*","read":".*"}
body_format: json
status_code: 204
it is basically equivalent to:
curl -i -u user:pass -H "content-type:application/json" -XPUT http://0.0.0.0:15672/api/permissions/my_vhost/my_user -d '{"configure":".*","write":".*","read":".*"}'