Ansible: Set variable to file content

You can use lookups in Ansible in order to get the contents of a file, e.g.

user_data: "{{ lookup('file', user_data_file) }}"

Caveat: This lookup will work with local files, not remote files.

Here’s a complete example from the docs:

- hosts: all
  vars:
     contents: "{{ lookup('file', '/etc/foo.txt') }}"
  tasks:
     - debug: msg="the value of foo.txt is {{ contents }}"