Ansible Vault Tutorial

In this tutorial, I try to explain how to structure one Ansible environment with:

• Ansible Vault support
• master key is stored in secret file encrypted with GPG
• Many users support: master key can is encrypted with several GPG Keys

Prerequisite

• Ansible

$ brew install ansible gnupg

Optional, for test only:

• Virtualbox and vagrant

$ brew install python3
$ brew cask install vagrant virtualbox
$ pip3 install paramiko

Create or edit secret file

If secret file not exist:

$ ansible-vault create hosts/group_vars/all/secrets.yml

or edit this file:

$ ansible-vault edit hosts/group_vars/all/secrets.yml

Show secret content:

$ ansible-vault view hosts/group_vars/all/secrets.yml
my_secret: password

Execute demo

Start vagrant server

$ vagrant up

Test if vagrant ping:

$ ansible -m ping all                                                                                                                                                                           ✘ 2 master ◼
server | SUCCESS => {
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}

Execute test playbook which use Ansible Vault

ansible-playbook playbooks/demo.yml                                                                                                                                                              

PLAY [server] ******************************************************************

TASK [Gathering Facts] *********************************************************
ok: [server]

TASK [demo : Upload template file to /home/ubuntu/test1.txt] *******************
ok: [server]

PLAY RECAP ********************************************************************
server                     : ok=2    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0

Check secret content in test1.txt file:

$ vagrant ssh -c "cat test1.txt"
variable: password

How Ansible Vault password is configured

Master key is stored in secrets/ansible-vault-password.txt.gpg file. Read secrets/README.md to know how to generate this file.

Default Vault password file is configured like this in ansible.cfg

vault_password_file = secrets/ansible-vault.sh

The secrets/ansible-vault.sh file is a script which use gpg to decrypt master key:

#!/bin/bash
gpg --decrypt --quiet --batch secrets/ansible-vault-password.txt.gpg