Using ansible-vault in “interactive mode” via bash

Question

I really love using ansible-vault on the command-line to encrypt/decrypt files easily. For example if I have a plaintext file called ~/fizzbuzz.foo with the following contents:

bupo

I can use this tool like so:

ansible-vault encrypt ~/fizzbuzz.foo
New Vault password: 123
Confirm New Vault password: 123

Boom -- encrypted! When I vi ~/fizzbuzz.foo now:

$ANSIBLE_VAULT;1.1;AES256
36663138613666623730653164333138343133383233313562363733346461663334393932393461
6535316532366130316237633633663565663366323162660a666630613738363035343663353132
33383530653235393431633231313765656135626538353163323366363039633836613265383332
3762666261326466370a643164393166346634343636346634383039356665646531353062303765
3734

I'd like to use this in a bash script where I pass the encryption/decryption password in as a script argument:

#!/bin/bash

# do some stuff

ansible-vault -i "bar" encrypt ~/fizzbuzz.foo

# do some more stuff

However I don't see anything like an interactive (e.g. -i) argument/mode for ansible-vault. The best I could find was a way of using an env file for storing passwords for the ansible-playbook utility but I played around with ansible-vault and couldn't find a similar behavior for it.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

you need to create the vault password file first, here is how:

openssl rand -base64 512 |xargs > vaultkeyfile

i am creating the vault file at local directory, but probably you want to place it to another one, like ~/.ansible_vault/ for example.

then to create/encrypt/decrypt the file, you use:

for new file:

ansible-vault create testfile.txt --vault-password-file=vaultkeyfile

for encrypting existing file:

ansible-vault encrypt testfile.txt --vault-password-file=vaultkeyfile

for decrypting:

ansible-vault decrypt testfile.txt --vault-password-file=vaultkeyfile

when executing the above, you will notice it doesn't ask for password.