Pretty printed dashboard export

[kongslund]

SUMMARY

Support exporting a dashboard with pretty printed JSON so that it becomes easier to compare changes with the previous version.

ISSUE TYPE

• Feature Idea

COMPONENT NAME

grafana_dashboard

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Often when I export dashboards, I have a need to compare them with previous versions.

I use the grafana_dashboard module for exporting the dashboards. The current JSON output is compact and not so easy to compare in a diff, so I have an additional step of pretty printing each exported dashboard file.

It would be more convenient for this use case if grafana_dashboard supports pretty printing out of the box.

I see two possible approaches to introducing this:

A) Change grafana_dashboard to always export dashboards as pretty printed. I prefer this one.
B) Add a module option export_style which determines if the resulting JSON should be compact as today or pretty printed. The two allowed values would be compact (default) and pretty.

Example:

- name: Export a pretty dashboard
  grafana_dashboard:
    grafana_url: "..."
    grafana_user: "..."
    grafana_password: "..."
    state: export
    export_style: pretty
    path: /a/pretty/dashboard.json
    overwrite: true
    uid: "{{ dashboard_uid }}"

Would there be interest if I create a PR for either approach A or B?

[rrey]

Hi @kongslund, solution A is good and a PR is welcome ! Thanks 🙏🏻 !

[rrey]

Just release v1.5.1 which include the fix for this issue. It should be available on Galaxy soon.
Thanks @kongslund !