Ansible querying AWS AMIs - amazon-web-services

Question

I'm trying to query AWS EC2 AMIs from Ansible but keep running into an error when looping through the results:
- hosts: localhost
tasks:
- name: Get AMI
ec2_ami_facts:
owner: amazon
filters:
architecture: x86_64
root-device-type: ebs
register: amis
- name: return filtered data
debug:
msg: "{{ item }}"
loop: " {{ amis \
| json_query( 'Images[?Description!=`null`] \
| [?starts_with(Description,`Amazon Linux`)]' ) \
}} "
The idea is to return the image documents, and later just the image IDs with more filtering (end goal is to get the most recent ami id for a given description). But with the current example, and anything else I try I get this error:
TASK [return filtered data] ****************************************************
fatal: [localhost]: FAILED! => {"msg": "Invalid data passed to 'loop',
it requires a list, got this instead: . Hint: If you passed a
list/dict of just one element, try adding wantlist=True to your lookup
invocation or use q/query instead of lookup."}
I can look at the 'amis' in its entirety and it looks good, but any filtering I try fails. What is the correct method?

Answer 1

This works, thanks for the folks at #ansible on freenode.
- hosts: localhost
tasks:
- name: Get AMI
ec2_ami_facts:
owner: amazon
filters:
architecture: x86_64
root-device-type: ebs
register: amis
- name: return latest AMI
set_fact:
my_ami: "{{ amis.images \
| selectattr('description', 'defined') \
| selectattr('description', 'match', '^Amazon Linux.*GP2$') \
| selectattr('description', 'match', '[^(Candidate)]') \
| sort(attribute='creation_date') \
| last }} "
- debug:
msg: "ami = {{ my_ami | to_nice_yaml }}"
Also see here: https://bitbucket.org/its-application-delivery/ansible-aws/src/master/ansible/task_find_ami.yml?fileviewer=file-view-default

Answer 2

Use following to dynamically fetch the latest AMI.
---
- name: Find latest AMI
ec2_ami_facts:
owners: 099720109477
region: "{{ AWS_REGION }}"
filters:
name: "ubuntu/images/hvm-ssd/ubuntu-bionic-18.04-amd64-server-*"
register: findami
- name: Sort the latest AMI
set_fact:
latest_ami: >
{{ findami.images | sort(attribute='creation_date') | last }}
- name: Launch Instance with latest AMI
ec2:
instance_type: "{{ INSTANCE_TYPE }}"
image: "{{ latest_ami.image_id }}"
key_name: "{{ KEY_NAME }}"
region: "{{ AWS_REGION }}"
group_id: "{{ sg.group_id }}"
wait: yes
count: "{{ INSTANCES_COUNT }}"
vpc_subnet_id: "{{ subnet.subnet.id }}"
assign_public_ip: no