Ansible Quick Start Guide

Password usage in playbooks

Many tasks require you to input a password to access a database or to use a CLI or access a third-party Terminal. It is never advisable to write passwords or other sensitive information openly on a playbook. There are multiple ways to protect this information. The two most common examples are to store them in another protected playbook or to use Ansible Vault.

In this section, we will mainly cover storing passwords and sensitive variables in other, more protected files. Ansible Vault will be covered thoroughly in a later chapter.

The idea is to create a playbook that contains several sensitive variables and store it in a secure location with restricted permissions. Then, the playbook calls for its variable using ...