How to run Ansible command to update imunify360 settings

Question

How can I use Ansible to run the following CloudLinux Imunify360 commands properly on CloudLinux 7 (similar to CentOS7)? I tried different ways to "escape" the colons in the commands and it doesn't run properly, even when a YAML syntax checker showed it's correct.

imunify360-agent config update '{"MALWARE_SCANNING": {"rapid_scan": true}}'
imunify360-agent config update '{"MALWARE_SCANNING": {"default_action": "cleanup"}, "MALWARE_SCAN_SCHEDULE":{"interval": "week"}}'
imunify360-agent config update '{"MALWARE_SCANNING": {"enable_scan_inotify": true}}'

from: https://blog.imunify360.com/new-default-settings-for-imunify360

Note: Imunify360 has a free trial.

Answer 1

It turns out single quote works where double quote and backslash didn't.

- name: Enable rapid scan
  command: imunify360-agent config update '{"MALWARE_SCANNING"':' {"rapid_scan"':' true}}'

I learned that folding block scalar (>) is an easy alternative and a good way to avoid escaping.

Answer 2

Assuming that you're already planning on executing each command in a separate task, you can just use a folding block scalar (>). While these are typically used for multi-line strings since they replace newlines with a single space, a bonus is that they don't evaluate escape sequences, so nothing needs to be escaped.

However, > alone won't strip the trailing newline character which is where - comes in.

- name: Enable rapid scan
  command: >-
    imunify360-agent config update '{"MALWARE_SCANNING": {"rapid_scan": true}}'

- name: Cleanup scan schedule
  command: >-
    imunify360-agent config update '{"MALWARE_SCANNING": {"default_action": "cleanup"}, "MALWARE_SCAN_SCHEDULE":{"interval": "week"}}'

- name: Enable scan inotify
  command: >-
    imunify360-agent config update '{"MALWARE_SCANNING": {"enable_scan_inotify": true}}'