Interactive input: prompts

.. _playbooks_prompts:

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.

.. contents:: :local:

Here is a most basic example:

.. code-block:: yaml

---
- hosts: all
  vars_prompt:

    - name: username
      prompt: What is your username?
      private: false

    - 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: false.

.. 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 AWX). See :ref:passing_variables_on_the_command_line.

If you have a variable that changes infrequently, you can provide a default value that can be overridden.

.. code-block:: yaml

vars_prompt:

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

Hashing values supplied by vars_prompt

You can hash the entered value so you can use it, for example, with the user module to define a password:

.. code-block:: yaml

vars_prompt:

 - name: my_password2
   prompt: Enter password2
   private: true
   encrypt: sha512_crypt
   confirm: true
   salt_size: 7

If you have Passlib <https://passlib.readthedocs.io/en/stable/>_ 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.

.. versionadded:: 2.7

If you do not have Passlib installed, Ansible uses the crypt <https://docs.python.org/3/library/crypt.html>_ 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

.. versionadded:: 2.8 .. _unsafe_prompts:

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:

.. code-block:: yaml

vars_prompt: - name: my_password_with_weird_chars prompt: Enter password unsafe: true private: true

.. seealso::

:ref:playbooks_intro An introduction to playbooks :ref:playbooks_conditionals Conditional statements in playbooks :ref:playbooks_variables All about variables :ref:Communication<communication> Got questions? Need help? Want to share your ideas? Visit the Ansible communication guide