Constructed Inventory does not get passed extra vars - AWX about awx

[jseifeddine]

Thanks @fosterseth and @AlanCoding for your response...

Is there any way for me to modify the cloned repo to add this in a quick fix ?
Like the invocation of the constrcuted inventory sync job - anything at all ?

Would be fantastic, because at the moment, we're just pasting a massive comma seperate list into the Limit of the job ...

cheers, happy to spend time to investigate if you point me in the right direction :)

What would be ideal - and I'm not really sure why this isn't "a thing" - is using the extra vars -e while building a dynamic inventory... bypassing the constructed inventory

#   MySQL Dynamic Inventory
#   https://github.com/j-oss2023/mysql-dynamic-inventory # Custom Dynamic Plugin
#   
#   Required columns: 
#   'inventory_group', 'inventory_hostname'
#
#   TLDR:
#   Besides the required columns, each column will be assigned 
#   as an ansible hostvar dynamically.

plugin: mysql-dynamic-inventory
db_host: "{{secrets.db_host}}"
db_user: "{{secrets.db_user}}"
db_pass: "{{secrets.db_pass}}"
db_name: "{{secrets.db_name}}"
db_query: |
  SELECT 
    'motorvehicle_co' as inventory_group,
    host as inventory_hostname,
    address as ansible_host,
    account as customer from dealerships
  WHERE customer = "{{target_customer}}"

Then simply calling the playbook like so

ansible-playbook -i per_customer_mysql.yml setup.yml -e 'target_customer="Ferrari"'

That would rock!
But I've read a lot of places that it's simply unattainable ...

Maybe i'm just coming at this at the wrong angle and it's giving me tunnel vision 😆
But I wish this was possible...

[jseifeddine]

Please also see:

https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/ansible/builtin/constructed_inventory.html#parameter-use_extra_vars

[fosterseth]

@AlanCoding is AWX expected to support the use_extra_vars: True declaration?

[AlanCoding]

This is a valid point. The problem is that it runs ansible-inventory to save the content to the database before it is used in a job (ansible-playbook) at which time it is re-serialized from the database. There's not a 1-to-1 mapping of constructed inventories to jobs, so there's not a way to make this feature work without breaking other things. Maybe there's some envelope of parameters where it is set to update on launch and the plugin specifics this parameter, it would be okay to apply the job's extra_vars to the constructed inventory.

[jseifeddine]

Thanks @fosterseth and @AlanCoding for your response...

Is there any way for me to modify the cloned repo to add this in a quick fix ? Like the invocation of the constrcuted inventory sync job - anything at all ?

Would be fantastic, because at the moment, we're just pasting a massive comma seperate list into the Limit of the job ...

cheers, happy to spend time to investigate if you point me in the right direction :)

What would be ideal - and I'm not really sure why this isn't "a thing" - is using the extra vars -e while building a dynamic inventory... bypassing the constructed inventory

#   MySQL Dynamic Inventory
#   https://github.com/j-oss2023/mysql-dynamic-inventory # Custom Dynamic Plugin
#   
#   Required columns: 
#   'inventory_group', 'inventory_hostname'
#
#   TLDR:
#   Besides the required columns, each column will be assigned 
#   as an ansible hostvar dynamically.

plugin: mysql-dynamic-inventory
db_host: "{{secrets.db_host}}"
db_user: "{{secrets.db_user}}"
db_pass: "{{secrets.db_pass}}"
db_name: "{{secrets.db_name}}"
db_query: |
  SELECT 
    'motorvehicle_co' as inventory_group,
    host as inventory_hostname,
    address as ansible_host,
    account as customer from dealerships
  WHERE customer = "{{target_customer}}"

Then simply calling the playbook like so

ansible-playbook -i per_customer_mysql.yml setup.yml -e 'target_customer="Ferrari"'

That would rock! But I've read a lot of places that it's simply unattainable ...

Maybe i'm just coming at this at the wrong angle and it's giving me tunnel vision 😆 But I wish this was possible...

I've fixed the plugin,
#14868 (comment)

which now correctly templates vars in the inventory config file... so that is working now with ansible cli ...

but still - AWX bug fix / feature enhancment is needed to allow it to read those extra vars inside AWX...