Prompts

When running a playbook, you may wish to prompt the user for certain input, and can do so with the ‘vars_prompt’ section.

A common use for this might be for asking for sensitive data that you do not want to record.

This has uses beyond security, for instance, you may use the same playbook for all software releases and would prompt for a particular release version in a push-script.

Here is a most basic example:

---
- hosts: all
  remote_user: root

  vars:
    from: "camelot"

  vars_prompt:
    - name: "name"
      prompt: "what is your name?"
    - name: "quest"
      prompt: "what is your quest?"
    - name: "favcolor"
      prompt: "what is your favorite color?"

If you have a variable that changes infrequently, it might make sense to provide a default value that can be overridden. This can be accomplished using the default argument:

vars_prompt:

  - name: "release_version"
    prompt: "Product release version"
    default: "1.0"

An alternative form of vars_prompt allows for hiding input from the user, and may later support some other options, but otherwise works equivalently:

vars_prompt:

  - name: "some_password"
    prompt: "Enter password"
    private: yes

  - name: "release_version"
    prompt: "Product release version"
    private: no

If Passlib is installed, vars_prompt can also crypt 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

You can use any crypt scheme supported by ‘Passlib’:

• 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

However, the only parameters accepted are ‘salt’ or ‘salt_size’. You can use your own salt using ‘salt’, or have one generated automatically using ‘salt_size’. If nothing is specified, a salt of size 8 will be generated.