Ansible purchasing a domain name and using python

Question

This is an action in my Ansible playbook:

- name: Purchase Domain Name
  local_action: >
        uri
        url=https://api.sandbox.namecheap.com/xml.response
        method=GET
        body="{{ namecheap_purchase_domain_name }}"
        status_code=200
        HEADER_Content-Type="application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
        return_content=yes
  register: domain_name_purchase

- debug: var=domain_name_purchase.content

It returns something like this:

ok: [162.243.67.77] => {
    "domain_name_purchase.content": "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?>\r\n<ApiResponse Status=\"ERROR\" xmlns=\"http://api.namecheap.com/xml.response\">\r\n  <Errors>\r\n    <Error Number=\"4014104\">Possible duplicate create command for unavailable domain. Try again after 11/20/2013 7:51:07 AM UTC</Error>\r\n  </Errors>\r\n  <Warnings />\r\n  <RequestedCommand>namecheap.domains.create</RequestedCommand>\r\n  <CommandResponse Type=\"namecheap.domains.create\">\r\n    <DomainCreateResult Domain=\"elitereceipt202321414.com\" ChargedAmount=\"0\" DomainID=\"0\" OrderID=\"0\" TransactionID=\"0\" WhoisguardEnable=\"false\" FreePositiveSSL=\"false\" NonRealTimeDomain=\"false\" />\r\n  </CommandResponse>\r\n  <Server>WEB1-SANDBOX1</Server>\r\n  <GMTTimeDifference>--5:00</GMTTimeDifference>\r\n  <ExecutionTime>0.07</ExecutionTime>\r\n</ApiResponse>", 
    "item": ""
}

Is it possible to use something like xmltodict.parse to parse the xml and turn it into a dict? In particular I'm looking to return ApiResponse Status (which returns ERROR or SUCCESS) and Error Number. Thanks.

Answer 1

There's a recent, external Ansible module that allows to parse and manipulate XML, check it here

Unfortunately, even if it is supposed to accept XML strings (and thus Ansible variables) as input, I couldn't get it to work properly. You would have to save your XML to a file first, and then parse it:

- name: Purchase Domain Name
  local_action: >
        uri
        url=https://api.sandbox.namecheap.com/xml.response
        method=GET
        body="{{ namecheap_purchase_domain_name }}"
        status_code=200
        HEADER_Content-Type="application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
        return_content=yes
  register: domain_name_purchase

- name: save Namecheap output
  copy: content="{{domain_name_purchase.content}}" dest=resp.xml
  delegate_to: localhost

- name: Parse Namecheap XML
  xml: file=resp.xml xpath="/ApiResponse/etc..." content=text
  register: resp_status_node
  delegate_to: localhost

- debug: msg="{{resp_status_node.matches[0]}}"

Answer 2

lxml can easily parse this string as XML:

>>> import lxml.objectify
>>> my_xml = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?>\r\n<ApiResponse Status=\"ERROR\" xmlns=\"http://api.namecheap.com/xml.response\">\r\n  <Errors>\r\n    <Error Number=\"4014104\">Possible duplicate create command for unavailable domain. Try again after 11/20/2013 7:51:07 AM UTC</Error>\r\n  </Errors>\r\n  <Warnings />\r\n  <RequestedCommand>namecheap.domains.create</RequestedCommand>\r\n  <CommandResponse Type=\"namecheap.domains.create\">\r\n    <DomainCreateResult Domain=\"elitereceipt202321414.com\" ChargedAmount=\"0\" DomainID=\"0\" OrderID=\"0\" TransactionID=\"0\" WhoisguardEnable=\"false\" FreePositiveSSL=\"false\" NonRealTimeDomain=\"false\" />\r\n  </CommandResponse>\r\n  <Server>WEB1-SANDBOX1</Server>\r\n  <GMTTimeDifference>--5:00</GMTTimeDifference>\r\n  <ExecutionTime>0.07</ExecutionTime>\r\n</ApiResponse>"
>>> root = lxml.objectify.fromstring(my_xml)
>>> root.get('Status')  # Attributes use get syntax
'ERROR'
>>> root.Errors
<Element {http://api.namecheap.com/xml.response}Errors at 0x1019cd3c0>
>>> root.Errors.Error
'Possible duplicate create command for unavailable domain. Try again after 11/20/2013 7:51:07 AM UTC'