File extensions are not a requirement

[kmullin]

Hey there! Thank you for making this awesome library!

Trying to use it on our ansible inventories and group_vars structure led to some weird results where I could not parse any of our group_vars properly.

I found that in the library there is a hard requirement on having group_var files with extensions:

aini/vars.go

Lines 110 to 112 in b67a1e9

	if ext != ".yaml" && ext != ".yml" {
	return nil
	}

This requirement is not in ansible itself, as we have no problems with our current structure.

Current ansible use case

Here is an example structure that works fine with ansible:

$ tree inventories
inventories
├── group_vars
│   ├── group_a
│   └── some_awesome_cluster
└── some_awesome_cluster

$ cat inventories/some_awesome_cluster
[group_a]
a-beefy-server          ansible_host=12.34.56.78    private_ip=192.168.0.53    machine_id=foo124

[some_awesome_cluster:children]
group_a

$ cat inventories/group_vars/some_awesome_cluster
cluster_name: awesome
region: eu-west-2
$ cat inventories/group_vars/group_a
something: here

Ansible [core 2.17.6] does not have any issue with the file naming:

$ ansible-inventory -i inventories/some_awesome_cluster --list
{
    "_meta": {
        "hostvars": {
            "a-beefy-server": {
                "ansible_host": "12.34.56.78",
                "cluster_name": "awesome",
                "machine_id": "foo124",
                "private_ip": "192.168.0.53",
                "region": "eu-west-2",
                "something": "here"
            }
        }
    },
    "all": {
        "children": [
            "ungrouped",
            "some_awesome_cluster"
        ]
    },
    "group_a": {
        "hosts": [
            "a-beefy-server"
        ]
    },
    "some_awesome_cluster": {
        "children": [
            "group_a"
        ]
    }
}

ainidump (from commit b67a1e990856ac488c888cab9bfcda9fe62015df) output on the same inventory/group_vars files (notice lack of group_vars):

$ go run ./cmd/ainidump ./inventories/some_awesome_cluster
{
    "Hosts": [
        {
            "Name": "a-beefy-server",
            "Groups": [
                "group_a",
                "some_awesome_cluster",
                "all"
            ],
            "Vars": {
                "ansible_host": "12.34.56.78",
                "machine_id": "foo124",
                "private_ip": "192.168.0.53"
            }
        }
    ],
    "Groups": [
        {
            "Name": "all",
            "Parents": [],
            "Descendants": [
                "group_a",
                "some_awesome_cluster",
                "ungrouped"
            ],
            "Hosts": [
                "a-beefy-server"
            ],
            "Vars": {}
        },
        {
            "Name": "group_a",
            "Parents": [
                "some_awesome_cluster",
                "all"
            ],
            "Descendants": [],
            "Hosts": [
                "a-beefy-server"
            ],
            "Vars": {}
        },
        {
            "Name": "some_awesome_cluster",
            "Parents": [
                "all"
            ],
            "Descendants": [
                "group_a"
            ],
            "Hosts": [
                "a-beefy-server"
            ],
            "Vars": {}
        },
        {
            "Name": "ungrouped",
            "Parents": [
                "all"
            ],
            "Descendants": [],
            "Hosts": [],
            "Vars": {}
        }
    ]
}

Open Question / Discussion

If we don't care about the file extension, when we parse what we expect to be the vars from a YAML format, and we get an error from yaml.Unmarshal:

aini/vars.go

Lines 118 to 121 in b67a1e9

	err = yaml.Unmarshal(f, &vars)
	if err != nil {
	return err
	}

We kinda have to ignore it, or maybe print out warnings?

With the current test coverage at least, because it has junk_file.txt, we can't actually return an error here, or we never end up reading the some_vars.yml file.

How would you want to better handle this in tests?
I realize its not a great idea to ignore parsing errors here, but I question why there is even a junk_file.txt to begin with, as ansible should just ignore it too.

Minor deprecation changes

• ioutil.ReadFile is deprecated use os.ReadFile instead