Sending dicts, lists etc. as arguments to a fabric task using json

A quick tip if you need to send more complex objects than strings to a fabric task.

It’s basically just a matter of proper escaping and using python’s json library to parse. Keep in mind:

• Put single quotes around the “argument” (the whole json string) and use doublequotes in the json structure itself
• Escape all “,” in the json with “\,”

In short you can call a task like so:

fab [args] mytask:petdict='{"cat": "1"\, "dog": "1"}'

Then, from within the task itself you just…

import json
...
def mytask(petdict=None):
    if petdict:
        parsed_dict = json.loads(petdict)