Setting an environment variable in Ansible from the output of a bash command

Question

I would like to set the output of a shell command as an environment variable in Ansible.

To do this, I did the following:

- name: Copy content of config.json into variable
  shell:  /bin/bash -l -c "cat /storage/config.json"
  register: copy_config
  tags: something

- name: set config
  shell: "echo $TEMP_CONFIG"
  environment:
    TEMP_CONFIG: "{{copy_config}}"
  tags: something

But somehow, after an inconspicuous run, when I run the following command:

echo ${TEMP_CONFIG}

in my terminal it gives an empty result.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

There are at least two problems:

• You must pass copy_config.stdoutas a variable

  - name: set config
    shell: "echo $TEMP_CONFIG"
    environment:
      TEMP_CONFIG: "{{copy_config.stdout}}"
    tags: something
  

• You need to register the results of the above task, and then print again stdout, so:

  - name: set config
    shell: "echo $TEMP_CONFIG"
    environment:
      TEMP_CONFIG: "{{copy_config.stdout}}"
    tags: something
    register: shell_echo
  
  - debug:
      var: shell_echo.stdout
  

• . , rc (, ~/.bash_profile, , Bash), TEMP_CONFIG. .