Botocore: ECS describe_services returns invalid JSON

[jamesdehart]

So I'm running into a problem with botocore and boto3 returning an invalid JSON payload.

The code i'm running:

import botocore.session

session = botocore.session.get_session()
client = session.create_client('ecs', region_name='us-east-1')
response = client.describe_services(
    cluster='MyCluster',
    services=[
        'nodeweb'
    ]
)

Sample output:

{u'services': [{u'status': u'ACTIVE', u'taskDefinition': u'arn:aws:ecs:us-east-1:123456789012:task-definition/Webserver:36', u'pendingCount': 0, u'loadBalancers': [], u'placementConstraints': [], u'createdAt': datetime.datetime(2016, 12, 6, 12, 12, 38, 220000, tzinfo=tzlocal()), u'desiredCount': 1,

Lib's I have installed:

boto (2.42.0)
boto3 (1.4.4)
botocore (1.5.4)

It seems to be an issue with the following fields.

u'updatedAt': datetime.datetime(2017, 1, 20, 18, 31, 6, 82000, tzinfo=tzlocal()),
u'createdAt': datetime.datetime(2016, 12, 6, 12, 12, 38, 220000, tzinfo=tzlocal())

I tested the CLI version and it outputs the correct values.

aws ecs describe-services --cluster 'MyCluster' --services 'nodeweb'

Output:

            "deployments": [
                {
                    "status": "PRIMARY",
                    "pendingCount": 0,
                    "createdAt": 1484965866.082,
                    "desiredCount": 1,
                    "taskDefinition": "arn:aws:ecs:us-east-1:123456789012:task-definition/Webserver:36",
                    "updatedAt": 1484965866.082,
                    "id": "ecs-svc/123456789012",
                    "runningCount": 1
                }
            ],

I hope I have provided enough information to help find out why this is happening.

Thanks to all!

[kyleknap]

Yeah so the reason that it is not valid JSON, is that python datetime.datetime's are not JSON serializeable. So you will have to add a handler to serialize the datetime to a string when dumping the JSON. Here is a Stack Overflow answer that shows how you can do that: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/35869985/datetime-datetime-is-not-json-serializable.

Hope this helps.

[jamesdehart]

Thank you so much! That is what I needed to do. Sorry if it was incorrect for me to post here.