Automating APIs with Ansible: A Comprehensive Guide

As IT professionals, we are constantly looking for ways to automate our workloads and streamline our workflows. One area where automation can be especially useful is in interacting with APIs. APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, are the backbone of modern software applications and services, and being able to automate API interactions can help us save time and reduce errors.

In this post, we will explore how we can use Ansible to automate APIs and perform various actions such as creating, updating, and deleting resources. We will use the “we” pronoun throughout this post to help you feel like we’re doing this together!

Step 1: Install Required Modules

Before we can start automating APIs with Ansible, we need to ensure that we have the required modules installed. Ansible provides several modules for interacting with APIs, including uri, rest_api, and na_ontap_rest. We can install these modules using the “ansible-galaxy” command.

For example, to install the uri module, we can run the following command:

ansible-galaxy collection install community.general

Step 2: Define API Credentials

To interact with an API, we need to provide authentication credentials. Ansible provides several ways to define API credentials, including environment variables, inventory files, and group vars.

For example, we can define API credentials in a group vars file as follows:

api:
  username: my_username
  password: my_password

Step 3: Define API Tasks

Once we have installed the required modules and defined API credentials, we can start defining API tasks. API tasks typically involve sending HTTP requests to the API endpoints and processing the responses.

For example, the following task uses the uri module to send an HTTP GET request to the /api/v1/users endpoint and retrieve a list of users:

- name: Get list of users
  uri:
    url: https://api.example.com/api/v1/users
    method: GET
    user: "{{ api.username }}"
    password: "{{ api.password }}"
  register: result

- debug:
    var: result.json

Step 4: Use API Responses

After sending an API request, we can use the response data to perform additional tasks. For example, we can use the json_query filter to extract specific data from the response and use it in subsequent tasks.

- name: Get user details
  uri:
    url: https://api.example.com/api/v1/users/{{ user_id }}
    method: GET
    user: "{{ api.username }}"
    password: "{{ api.password }}"
  register: result

- set_fact:
    user_details: "{{ result.json | json_query('data') }}"

- debug:
    var: user_details

In the above example, the json_query filter is used to extract the “data” object from the API response and store it in a variable named “user_details“.

Conclusion

As we have seen, Ansible provides several modules and features that make it easy to automate APIs. By using the uri, rest_api, and na_ontap_rest modules, defining API credentials, and defining API tasks, we can easily interact with RESTful APIs and automate various actions.

Automating APIs with Ansible can help us save time and reduce errors, enabling us to focus on more important tasks. With the steps outlined in this post, we can get started with automating our API interactions and take our automation efforts to the next level.