Getting started

By default all you need to do to use the debops.secret role is to include it in your common playbook at the beginning:

---
- name: Example playbook
  hosts: all
  become: True

  roles:
    - role: secret

That will allow all your roles in this and subsequent plays to access the secret variable and use it consistently.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work well when you use Ansible with --tags parameter, which might omit your common play, thus not setting secret* variables at all and changing your passwords to empty values, modifying config files incorrectly, basically not honoring the idempotency principle.

The solution to that problem is to either include debops.secret role in all your plays (similar to the one above), or include it as a dependency in roles that require it:

---
dependencies:
  - role: secret

This will ensure that roles utilizing secret variable will be able to access it correctly and you don't need to remember to include debops.secret role in all your playbooks.

Usage examples

Example password lookup with password written to a variable. You can define this variable anywhere Ansible variables can be defined, but if you want to give playbook users the ability to overwrite it in inventory, you should define it in role/defaults/main.yml:

---
mariadb__root_password: '{{ lookup("password", secret + "/credentials/" +
                            ansible_fqdn + "/mariadb/root/password length=20") }}'

When this variable is set in role/defaults/main.yml, you can easily overwrite it in your inventory, like this:

---
mariadb__root_password: 'correct horse battery staple'

You can also change the password directly in the secret directory, in this case in secret/credentials/hostname/mysql/root/password and Ansible should update the password on the remote server (if the role is written to support this).

Example file download task from remote host to Ansible controller, stored in secret directory:

---
- name: Download file to secret directory
  fetch:
    src: '/etc/fstab'
    flat: True
    dest: '{{ secret + "/storage/" + ansible_fqdn + "/etc/fstab" }}'

Example file upload task from Ansible Controller to remote host with file from secret directory:

---
- name: Copy file from secret directory
  copy:
    dest: '/etc/fstab'
    owner: 'root'
    group: 'root'
    mode: '0644'
    src: '{{ secret + "/storage/ + ansible_fqdn + "/etc/fstab" }}"