Interactive input: prompts¶
If you want your playbook to prompt the user for certain input, add a ‘vars_prompt’ section. Prompting the user for variables lets you avoid recording sensitive data like passwords. In addition to security, prompts support flexibility. For example, if you use one playbook across multiple software releases, you could prompt for the particular release version.
Here is a most basic example:
---
- hosts: all
vars_prompt:
- name: username
prompt: What is your username?
private: no
- name: password
prompt: What is your password?
tasks:
- name: Print a message
ansible.builtin.debug:
msg: 'Logging in as {{ username }}'
The user input is hidden by default but it can be made visible by setting private: no
.
Note
Prompts for individual vars_prompt
variables will be skipped for any variable that is already defined through the command line --extra-vars
option, or when running from a non-interactive session (such as cron or Ansible Tower). See Defining variables at runtime.
If you have a variable that changes infrequently, you can provide a default value that can be overridden:
vars_prompt:
- name: release_version
prompt: Product release version
default: "1.0"
Encrypting values supplied by vars_prompt
¶
You can encrypt the entered value so you can use it, for instance, with the user module to define a password:
vars_prompt:
- name: my_password2
prompt: Enter password2
private: yes
encrypt: sha512_crypt
confirm: yes
salt_size: 7
If you have Passlib installed, you can use any crypt scheme the library supports:
des_crypt - DES Crypt
bsdi_crypt - BSDi Crypt
bigcrypt - BigCrypt
crypt16 - Crypt16
md5_crypt - MD5 Crypt
bcrypt - BCrypt
sha1_crypt - SHA-1 Crypt
sun_md5_crypt - Sun MD5 Crypt
sha256_crypt - SHA-256 Crypt
sha512_crypt - SHA-512 Crypt
apr_md5_crypt - Apache’s MD5-Crypt variant
phpass - PHPass’ Portable Hash
pbkdf2_digest - Generic PBKDF2 Hashes
cta_pbkdf2_sha1 - Cryptacular’s PBKDF2 hash
dlitz_pbkdf2_sha1 - Dwayne Litzenberger’s PBKDF2 hash
scram - SCRAM Hash
bsd_nthash - FreeBSD’s MCF-compatible nthash encoding
The only parameters accepted are ‘salt’ or ‘salt_size’. You can use your own salt by defining ‘salt’, or have one generated automatically using ‘salt_size’. By default Ansible generates a salt of size 8.
New in version 2.7.
If you do not have Passlib installed, Ansible uses the crypt library as a fallback. Ansible supports at most four crypt schemes, depending on your platform at most the following crypt schemes are supported:
bcrypt - BCrypt
md5_crypt - MD5 Crypt
sha256_crypt - SHA-256 Crypt
sha512_crypt - SHA-512 Crypt
New in version 2.8.
Allowing special characters in vars_prompt
values¶
Some special characters, such as {
and %
can create templating errors. If you need to accept special characters, use the unsafe
option:
vars_prompt:
- name: my_password_with_weird_chars
prompt: Enter password
unsafe: yes
private: yes
See also
- Intro to playbooks
An introduction to playbooks
- Conditionals
Conditional statements in playbooks
- Using Variables
All about variables
- User Mailing List
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- irc.freenode.net
#ansible IRC chat channel