Weird Ansible parsing on JSON/Jinja2 templates

Problem

Ansible does something bad when templating JSON files, which means this code:

"{{ lookup('template', 'template.json.j2') | from_json }}"

sometimes results in the following error:

FAILED! => {"msg": "Unexpected templating type error occurred on ({{ lookup('template', 'template.json.j2') | from_json }}): expected string or buffer"}

Solution

Use convert_data=False, as described in this commit, not yet released for some reason 🤔