I recently had the need to export an AAP inventory and use it manually with ansible. However there’s no easy way to do this and I couldn’t find anything online to do this, so I crafted a little conversion script.

First of all, you need to export your AWX/AAP inventory from the API (just go to https://your.awx.domain/api/v2/inventories/<inventory id>/script/?format=json&hostvars=1) and save the file locally.

Afterwards, copy the below script and run it against the json inventory

import json
import yaml
import argparse

def convert_inventory(json_file, yaml_file):
    try:
        with open(json_file, 'r') as infile:
            inventory = json.load(infile)
        
        with open(yaml_file, 'w') as outfile:
            def convert_lists_to_dicts(obj):
                if isinstance(obj, list):
                    return {str(item): None for item in obj}
                elif isinstance(obj, dict):
                    return {key: convert_lists_to_dicts(value) for key, value in obj.items()}
                else:
                    return obj

            inventory = convert_lists_to_dicts(inventory)            
            for hostname,hostvars in inventory['_meta']['hostvars'].items():
                inventory['all']['hosts'][hostname] = hostvars
            del inventory['_meta']
            yaml.dump(inventory, outfile, default_flow_style=False)            
        print(f"Converted {json_file} to {yaml_file} successfully.")
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error: {e}")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="Convert Ansible inventory from JSON to YAML format.")
    parser.add_argument("json_file", help="Path to the input inventory.json file")
    parser.add_argument("yaml_file", help="Path to the output inventory.yml file")
    
    args = parser.parse_args()
    convert_inventory(args.json_file, args.yaml_file)