Ansible Vaults

 Ansible Vaults

Ansible vaults are a powerful tool for securely storing sensitive information such as passwords, keys, and certificates. They allow you to encrypt and store sensitive data in a single file, which can then be used in your Ansible playbooks. In this blog, we will discuss what Ansible vaults are, how to use them, and provide some examples of how they can be used. Ansible vaults are encrypted files that can be used to store sensitive data such as passwords, keys, and certificates. They are encrypted using a symmetric encryption algorithm, which means that the same key is used to both encrypt and decrypt the data. This makes them secure and prevents unauthorized access to the data. Ansible vaults can be used in a variety of ways. For example, they can be used to store passwords for remote servers, keys for SSH connections, and certificates for secure communication. They can also be used to store configuration files, such as database connection strings, that contain sensitive information. Using Ansible vaults is relatively straightforward. To create a vault, you simply need to create a file with the extension .vault and then use the ansible-vault command to encrypt it. You can then use the ansible-vault command to decrypt the file when you need to access the data. Ansible vaults can also be used to store variables in playbooks. This allows you to store sensitive data in a secure location and then reference it in your playbooks without having to store it in plain text. To do this, you simply need to add the “vars_files” directive to your playbook and specify the path to the vault file. Here is an example of how to use Ansible vaults to store a password in a playbook: vars_files: - vault.yml vault_password: "my_secret_password" tasks: - name: Set password set_fact: password: "{{ vault_password }}" In this example, we are using the “vars_files” directive to specify the path to the vault file. We are then setting a variable called “vault_password” to the value of the password stored in the vault. Finally, we are using the “set_fact” module to set a variable called “password” to the value of the “vault_password” variable. Ansible vaults are a powerful tool for securely storing sensitive data. They allow you to encrypt and store data in a single file, which can then be used in your playbooks. They can also be used to store variables in playbooks, which allows you to reference sensitive data without having to store it in plain text.