Securing a Playbook with Ansible Vault

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Securing a Playbook with Ansible Vault

Information is power, and keeping power in the proper hands is important for every system administrator. One method of doing it is by encrypting files that have sensitive information, like passwords, in them. This is especially important when doing something like using `git` to keep playbooks managed. This lab will help practice doing this and working with Ansible. *This course is not approved or sponsored by Red Hat.*

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Lab Info

Level

Beginner

Last updated

Sep 24, 2025

Duration

45m

Challenge

Write the Playbook to be Encrypted

Note: Please wait an extra minute after the lab starts to make sure all the resources for the lab are ready.

Our playbook, dba-pass.yml, should look similar to this once we're done editing it:

---
- name: Deploy DBA password file
  hosts: dbservers
  become: yes

  tasks:
   - name: Create and pgapass file
     lineinfile:
      line: 'LinuxAcad'
      create: yes
      owner: dba
      group: dba
      mode: 0600
      path: /home/dba/.pgpass

Challenge

Encrypt the Playbook
To encrypt the playbook, we'l run this:
```
ansible-vault encrypt dba-pass.yml
```
Give a password, then confirm that password, and do not forget that password.

Now if we try to read that file (cat dba-pass.yml) we'll get a bunch of useless numbers across the screen.
Challenge

Run the Encrypted Playbook
To run this encrypted playbook, we'll use this command:
```
ansible-playbook --ask-vault-pass dba-pass.yml
```
Once we supply the vault password, Ansible will run the playbook just like it would any other.

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