How to add time to the current timestamp in Ansible?

I am attempting to automate a few tasks in Ansible and while I've gotten everything else to work, I need to have a start_time and end_time variable that adds time to the current timestamp as the ServiceNow system does not accept a current timestamp when creating a change request.

For example, I have a variable start_time as "{{ lookup('pipe', date +\"%Y-%m-%d %r\"') }}" but I would need that to be the current time +5 minutes for example. Likewise on the end_date, but something like +15 minutes.

Solution

If you are going to use lookup_plugins and pipe, you may just add 5 mins by using date +"%Y-%m-%d %r" -d "5 mins".

Thanks to

Incrementing current date by 5 minutes

Nevertheless it is recommend to use Ansible variables like ansible_date_time from facts.

date_time:
  date: '2021-11-23'
  day: '23'
  epoch: '1637678908'
  hour: '15'
  iso8601: '2021-11-23T14:48:28Z'
  iso8601_basic: 20211123T154828773386
  iso8601_basic_short: 20211123T154828
  iso8601_micro: '2021-11-23T14:48:28.773386Z'
  minute: '48'
  month: '11'
  second: '28'
  time: '15:48:28'
  tz: CET
  tz_offset: '+0100'
  weekday: Tuesday
  weekday_number: '2'
  weeknumber: '47'
  year: '2021'

Form there you could use epoch, minute or what would fit to your use case. See the other answer here.