Extract secret value only from SecretString using Ansible amazon.aws.aws_secret

Question

I am trying to get a secret value to a var from AWS Secret Manager using Ansible. My original attempt was as follows:

mySecret: "{{ lookup('amazon.aws.aws_secret', 'my/awesome/secret', region='eu-west-2')}}"

This returns a value like:

{"password" : "mypassword"}

All I want is the mypassword value

I have tried numerous ways using json_query including:

mySecret: "{{ lookup('amazon.aws.aws_secret', 'my/awesome/secret', region='eu-west-2') | from_json | json_query('SecretString.password') }}"

But this does not return a value.

What is the correct way of extracting the value only when using json_query with Ansible?

Answer 1

Ansible is very much JSON capable, it can read properly a JSON object and get you properties of the said JSON document by the dot . notation.

Given the JSON

{ 
  "secret": { 
    "password" : "mypassword" 
  } 
}

You can access it simply via secret.password, in Ansible.

Now, what it seems, from your comments, is that the lookup amazon.aws.aws_secret is not returning a JSON but a string, representing a JSON. So, in order to access it, you will have to use the to_json filter first, as you tried it, already.

But, beside that, the explanation here above still applies, so, this is what you are looking for:

secret: >-
  {{ 
    (lookup(
      'amazon.aws.aws_secret', 
      'my/awesome/secret', 
      region='eu-west-2'
    ) | from_json).password 
  }}