Decoding JSON string to terraform map

Question

I'm using the HTTP data source to retrieve data from an internal service. The service returns JSON data.

I can't interpolate the returned JSON data and look up data in it.

For example:

module A

data "http" "json_data" {
 url = "http://myservice/jsondata"
 # Optional request headers
 request_headers {
 "Accept" = "application/json"
 }
}
output "json_data_key" {
 value = "${lookup(data.http.json_data.body, "mykey")}"
}

main.tf

provider "aws" {
 region = "${var.region}"
 version = "~> 0.1"
}
module "moduleA" {
 source = "../../../terraform-modules/moduleA"
}
resource "aws_instance" "example" {
 ami = "ami-2757f631"
 instance_type = "${module.moduleA.json_data_key}"
}

The lookup function will fail to extract the key within the JSON data.

Is there any way to decode the JSON data into a terraform map ?

Answer 1

variable "json" {
 default = "{\"foo\": \"bar\"}"
}
data "external" "json" {
 program = ["echo", "${var.json}"]
}
output "map" {
 value = "${data.external.json.result}"
}

• user9074332: how, where is var.json defined in this example? is it read from an external file?
• victor m: It is just a variable with the JSON string.
• Alexander Pogrebnyak: Added explicit variable declaration

Answer 2

Since 0.12 version of the Terraform you can use jsondecode function to decode json into a Terraform map. More details on: https://www.terraform.io/docs/configuration/functions/jsondecode.html

example from the page above:

> jsondecode("{\"hello\": \"world\"}")
{
 "hello" = "world"
}
> jsondecode("true")
true

• HiTech: The Jsondecode function does not necessarily return a map. In fact, I personally haven't ever seen it return a map. From my experience, it always returns an object. I'm sure this is heavily dependent on the structure of your JSON string.

Answer 3

Not directly related to map convertion, but here's an additional sample with jsondecode if you got a multi-value secret (=JSON) in AWS SecretsManager & you want to use separate values from it in another service as I've struggled with this.

Retrieving the secret:

data "aws_secretsmanager_secret" "oauth_client" {
 name = "oauth-client"
}
data "aws_secretsmanager_secret_version" "oauth_client" {
 secret_id = data.aws_secretsmanager_secret.oauth_client.id
}

Using it at Lambda, as an example:

resource "aws_lambda_function" "lambda" {
 [...]
 environment {
 variables = {
 OAUTH_CLIENT_ID = jsondecode(data.aws_secretsmanager_secret_version.oauth_client.secret_string)["client_id"]
 OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET = jsondecode(data.aws_secretsmanager_secret_version.oauth_client.secret_string)["client_secret"]
 }
 }
}

Answer 4

It seems to be that the way to do the is by using the external data, as it return a map from a json response.