Ansible Vault

In this section, we are going to introduce the features, use cases, and best practices that are associated with Ansible Vault.

What is Ansible Vault?

Ansible Vault is a tool provided by Ansible that allows its users to encrypt secret variables, which can vary from authentication credentials and keys to sensitive and personal user information. Ansible Vault creates encrypted files to store variables, which can be moved to a secure location if necessary.

Ansible Vault is integrated transparently into the scripts of Ansible roles and playbooks. This means that Vault can encrypt any data structures that are located within those scripts. This includes host and group variables, either stored in the script or from another location imported using the include_vars option. They could also be located in thedefaultsorvarsfolder when dealing with an Ansible role. Vault can also encrypt task files when there is a need to hide the name of a particular variable.

Note

Ansible Vault can also be extended...