Adding parameter to prefix option with spaces for ini_file

[skinnayt]

SUMMARY

Add parameter to prefix option with spaces when formatting the options in a section.

This is useful for formatting some INI files. The use case here was specifically around the updating some options/values in an InfluxDB config file. This is usually in an users directory. (/home/user/.influxdbv2/configs)

ISSUE TYPE

• Feature Pull Request

COMPONENT NAME

ini_file module - new parameter option_prefix_spaces

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

With an existing InfluxDB configs file of the following:

[default]
  url = "http://localhost:8086"
  token = "someSuperSecretTokenThatIsLong"
  org = "myorg"

Using the below task:

- name: Update url in InfluxDB user config
  community.general.ini_file:
    path: /home/user/.influxdbv2/configs
    section: default
    option: url
    value: https://localhost:8086

produces the following in the configs file:

[default]
url = "https://localhost:8086"
token = "someSuperSecretTokenThatIsLong"
org = "myorg"

While this seems okay, the next time that the influx or influxd commands are used, it reformats the file the to the format that it expects. Running ansible again tries to change the file as it notices that the current content is different than what the expected content will be after running the task

Adding the new ini_file parameter allows the change to be applied once and not affect now the influx/influxd commands formats the file.

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[felixfontein]

Thanks for your contribution!

It seems you want this option to use the ini_file module to operate on TOML files. I don't think it's a good idea to use the ini_file module for TOML files, and I'm not sure whether adding this option to the ini_file module is a good idea since its main application seems to be to edit TOML files.

[felixfontein]

As the file extension indicates this is NOT an INI file, but a TOML file.

Using ini_file for a TOML file is generally not a good idea, and definitely should not appear in the examples to avoid suggesting this to users.

[felixfontein]

According to https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v2/reference/config-options/#influxdb-configuration-file .ini is not supported.

[felixfontein]

It seems you want this option to use the ini_file module to operate on TOML files. I don't think it's a good idea to use the ini_file module for TOML files, and I'm not sure whether adding this option to the ini_file module is a good idea since its main application seems to be to edit TOML files.

This is the main problem with this PR, could you please comment on this? Are you aware of any actual INI files (which are not TOML files!) that need this indentation?

[skinnayt]

It seems you want this option to use the ini_file module to operate on TOML files. I don't think it's a good idea to use the ini_file module for TOML files, and I'm not sure whether adding this option to the ini_file module is a good idea since its main application seems to be to edit TOML files.

This is the main problem with this PR, could you please comment on this? Are you aware of any actual INI files (which are not TOML files!) that need this indentation?

I didn't find any other "module" in Ansible that provided the framework for handling this file. I do understand that this might not be the correct path forward. I can move the example back to the file extension of "toml" for the documentation.

I have looked around for modules to handle TOML and the current existing python ones don't do writing to a file very well. I will probably have to dig into the code to get it working.

If you would rather close this out and wait for a proper fix in a new module for handling toml code, I can make some attempts at that.

[felixfontein]

When searching a bit I found https://github.com/python-poetry/tomlkit which seems to preserve style and comments. With that implementing an Ansible module for modifying TOML files should be possible.