Ansible inventory plugin for azure throws encoding error - azure

Question

From what I understand using ansible-inventory-plugins over dynamic-inventory-provisioners is the new way of handling dynamic hosts, as of cloud providers and so on.
So, at first I've set the azure credentials in my environment:
± env | grep AZ
AZURE_SECRET=asdf
AZURE_TENANT=asdf
AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID=asdf
AZURE_CLIENT_ID=asdf
Next, I've written an ansible.cfg with the following content:
± cat ansible.cfg
[inventory]
enable_plugins = azure_rm
Finally I wrote the yaml file with the minimum setting as shown at the ansible inventory plugin page:
± cat foo.azure_rm.yaml
---
plugin: azure_rm
When I am running the ansible-inventory binary on that file, I get:
± ansible-inventory -i foo.azure_rm.yaml --list
[WARNING]: * Failed to parse /path/to/foo.azure_rm.yaml with azure_rm plugin: Unicode-objects must be encoded before hashing
[WARNING]: Unable to parse /path/to/foo.azure_rm.yaml as an inventory source
[WARNING]: No inventory was parsed, only implicit localhost is available
{
"_meta": {
"hostvars": {}
},
"all": {
"children": [
"ungrouped"
]
},
"ungrouped": {}
}
Summing up: The main problem seems to be the line:
[WARNING]: * Failed to parse /path/to/foo.azure_rm.yaml with azure_rm plugin: Unicode-objects must be encoded before hashing
Help, anyone?

Answer 1

I think this is an error in the script. Adding the debug flag to Ansible gives me the following stacktrace:
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/ansible/inventory/manager.py", line 273, in parse_source
plugin.parse(self._inventory, self._loader, source, cache=cache)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/ansible/plugins/inventory/azure_rm.py", line 235, in parse
self._get_hosts()
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/ansible/plugins/inventory/azure_rm.py", line 292, in _get_hosts
self._process_queue_batch()
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/ansible/plugins/inventory/azure_rm.py", line 412, in _process_queue_batch
result.handler(r['content'], **result.handler_args)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/ansible/plugins/inventory/azure_rm.py", line 357, in _on_vm_page_response
self._hosts.append(AzureHost(h, self, vmss=vmss))
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/ansible/plugins/inventory/azure_rm.py", line 466, in __init__
self.default_inventory_hostname = '{0}_{1}'.format(vm_model['name'], hashlib.sha1(vm_model['id']).hexdigest()[0:4])
It seems this was only recently fixed: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/46608. So either you'll have to wait for 2.8 or use development version.

Answer 2

I've fixed it in a github fork and use pipenv to include this version in my environment. Actually it should be a backup port from devel, where the problem is already fixed. Maybe I'll fix this during the coming days and do a PR at ansible to include it into stable-2.7, but maybe the better option is to wait for 2.8 in May.

Answer 3

I have had the same issue and solve it by using python3
you can check your ansible python version with the following command
ansible --version | grep "python version"
python version = 2.7.17 (default, Nov 7 2019, 10:07:09) [GCC 7.4.0]
install all python3 packages
pip3 install ansible azure azure-cli
if needed export env variable for the authentication
export ANSIBLE_AZURE_AUTH_SOURCE=cli
then run ansible inventory with
python3 $(which ansible-inventory) -i my.azure_rm.yaml --graph
my.azure_rm.yml file looks like this one:
plugin: azure_rm
include_vm_resource_groups:
- my_resource_group_rg
auth_source: cli