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 }}"

You can use the slurp module to fetch a file from the remote host: (Thanks to @mlissner for suggesting it)

vars:
  amazon_linux_ami: "ami-fb8e9292"
  user_data_file: "base-ami-userdata.sh"
tasks:
- name: Load data
  slurp:
    src: "{{ user_data_file }}"
  register: slurped_user_data
- name: Decode data and store as fact # You can skip this if you want to use the right hand side directly...
  set_fact:
    user_data: "{{ slurped_user_data.content | b64decode }}"

You can use fetch module to copy files from remote hosts to local, and lookup module to read the content of fetched files.