Problem with ansible-beats and processors config

Elastic Stack Beats
1

Hi there! I am trying to install/configure filebeat with the ansible role from elastic.
My playbook looks like this:

- hosts: filebeat_hosts
  roles:
    - role: role-beats
  vars:
    use_repository: true
    beats_version: 6.8.5
    beat: filebeat
    beat_conf:
      inputs:
        - type: log
          enabled: false
          paths:
        - type: docker
          enabled: true
          containers.ids: '*'

      filebeat.config.modules:
        path: ${path.config}/modules.d/*.yml
        reload.enabled: false

      setup.template.settings:
        index.number_of_shards: 3

      processors:
        - add_locale: ~
        - add_host_metadata: ~
        - add_cloud_metadata: ~
        - add_docker_metadata: ~

After running ansible-playbook with this the result on my host is fine with the exception of the processors section. It results in:

processors:
- add_locale: null
- add_host_metadata: null
- add_cloud_metadata: null
- add_docker_metadata: null

This is AFAIK normal since ansible/jinja2 is treating the ~ as an alias for null.
Escaping the ~ with single or double quotes results in this:

processors:
- add_locale: '~'
- add_host_metadata: '~'
- add_cloud_metadata: '~'
- add_docker_metadata: '~'

but filebeat then complaints with this message when trying to start and finally stops starting:

Exiting: error unpacking config data: required 'object', but found 'string' in field 'processors.0.add_locale' (source:'/etc/filebeat/filebeat.yml')

Any idea, how to configure this section with ansible?

Cheers, Martin

2

If I had to take a guess, I would say the escaping isn't working properly. You should get a config object like this:

processors:
- add_locale: ~

Note the lack of single quotes.

3

Exactly my opinion... but I was and am not able to make this work and produce the correct values in the config...

BTW: the template used (the original from elastic) uses the content of the content hash in this way:

{{ beat_conf | to_nice_yaml(indent=2) }}

4

Sorry, I edited my inital message. The formatting was garbled. Now it is like in my ansible playbook...