Allow tags strings containing commas in proxmox inventory plug-in

[Ajpantuso]

SUMMARY

Allowing proxmox tags strings containing commas to be passed as facts

ISSUE TYPE

• Bugfix Pull Request

COMPONENT NAME

plugins/inventory/proxmox.py

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

The current behavior of the proxmox inventory plugin will attempt to parse values containing commas from the PVE API configs endpoint as dictionaries. However tags strings disallow '=' characters which will always cause parsing to fail for tags strings presented as comma separated list. This change will explicitly allow the 'tags' config to bypass dict parsing.

[Ajpantuso]

I did notice issue #1503 was a similar concept to this PR, but as stated in the summary the proxmox tag string is not suited for key/value pairs and using the "notes" field as mentioned in the issue is a dead-end as the proxmox API has no method for returning it. (Probably because it's relatively free-formatted text)

[felixfontein]

CC @Aversiste @Thulium-Drake

[pabelanger]

recheck

[Thulium-Drake]

Maybe a silly question, as I don't use it (or never knew I needed this in life ;-) ), but where would one even configure tags for VMs? 😅
So I can test your change 😄

[Ajpantuso]

Maybe a silly question, as I don't use it (or never knew I needed this in life ;-) ), but where would one even configure tags for VMs? 😅
So I can test your change 😄

Not a silly question at all because PVE does not display tags in the UI and has a single line in the docs for them.

You can use the CLI on a proxmox node (I'm testing on 6.3-3) or the equivalent paths from the JSON API to set and get tags:
pvesh set /nodes/{node}/{lxc | qemu}/{vmid}/config -tags "tag string"
pvesh get /nodes/{node}/lxc | qemu}/{vmid}/config

For reference I'm using a terraform provider to set these and honestly despite this PR I wouldn't use tags in prod.
One big caveat is that the api paths for lxc throw 400's whenever a property is null even if it handles the method operation correctly so client's report failure for no reason. (I reported this on the PVE forums)

Also I tried using the "notes" field again like in issue #1503 and they are in fact returned by the API, but as the "description" field.
If you fill the notes with something like "key1=value1,key2=value2,..." the inventory plugin will parse it is a dict and you can use those keys for keyed groups with the constructed plugin.

However just like with "tags" if you wanted arbitrary text containing commas the inventory plugin will fail to parse returning no description fact.

So with the current functionality of the inventory plugin you can leverage what is probably a symptom of the side-effect caused by always attempting to parse strings containing commas as dicts to get tagged instances.

[Thulium-Drake]

Nice function, I must say it's kinda obscure (which IMHO is a shame, stuff like this can be really useful), maybe the Proxmox devs will actually expose it via the GUI in the future. FYI, you can also tag machines by adding the following key to a config file in /etc/pve/lxc|qemu/$VMID.conf

tags: my,first,tags

However, I'd like to propose 1 addition. My gut feeling is that tags themselves are separated by commas so they can form a list.

Can you convert the string with tags to a list? That's probably more in line of what people expect.

[Thulium-Drake]

Tested your code, results are very neat:

...
    "proxmox_swap": 2048,
    "proxmox_tags": "some,tags",
    "proxmox_tags_parsed": [
        "some",
        "tags"
    ],
    "proxmox_unprivileged": 1,
    "proxmox_vmid": "106",

...

LGTM

[felixfontein]

@Ajpantuso thanks for implementing this!
@Thulium-Drake thanks for reviewing!

[Andersson007]

@Ajpantuso hi, thanks for your contribution to proxmox and other modules/plugins! We could add your GH login to .github/BOTMETA.yml in a corresponding team as a maintainer.
You'll be notified about Issues/PRs related to this stuff and your shipit will be counted by bot for automerge (needs two for bugfixes and minor changes).
What do you think?

[Ajpantuso]

@Ajpantuso hi, thanks for your contribution to proxmox and other modules/plugins! We could add your GH login to .github/BOTMETA.yml in a corresponding team as a maintainer.
You'll be notified about Issues/PRs related to this stuff and your shipit will be counted by bot for automerge (needs two for bugfixes and minor changes).
What do you think?

Sure, I am willing to help maintain the modules/plugins I have contributed to.

[Andersson007]

@Ajpantuso great! Thanks! I created a PR #2286