I was unable to find documentation or Q&A covering this specific topic. I'm posting it here with the answer in the hopes that someone finds it useful. I am a member of a small group of automation engineers. One task is to provide automation in Tower for other engineers and admins.
The automation team is happy with our current setup which allows us to run plays from the commandline without locking our accounts, without typing a password every time, and with no passwords stored in plain text:
We use an ansible vault stored in each admin's profile to store encrypted login credentials, along with a gpg armored key. Each vault uses teh same name, similar to ~/.ansible/vault.yml
A script extracts the key and unlocks the vault.
The script is defined in ansible.cfg, [defaults], vault_identity_list.
the playbooks load the vault with vars_files
Tower in job isolation mode cannot access home directories. And we do not want vault+key outside the admin's home folder, subject to random prying. Tower has its own vault system that we use when using tower. We want to maintain our current method of commandline runs, but be able to use the same playbook in Tower and Engine.
I tried:
Forcing tower to read the vault. (no joy)
Playbook with vault commented out. (This worked in tower, but I had to toggle the commenting to run from commandline. Put a pin in this as a last resort.)
Using conditional to only load vars_files when ansible_user is not awx. (Well guess what, it still runs as the user who triggers the job. Put a pin in this to find another variable that is consistent and indicates tower is the platform.)
Using tags and skip-tags within tower to skip vars_files (no joy. Tags don't work on vars_files:)
What I found that worked:
skip-tags does exactly what I needed to do
learned about include_vars (this is a task module that can be tagged)
learned about pre_tasks (since we're including the become credentials in the vault, regular tasks would never be reached because 'no SUDO credentials' would prevent tasks from being run)
so:
pre_tasks:
- include_vars: ~/.ansible/vault.yml
tags: engine
and, in Tower, set the job template to skip-tags: engine
Now the same play works in or out of Tower. With minimal authentication. Without plaintext passwords.
Related
Greeting everyone,
I've recently started messing with Ansible (in particular Ansible Tower).
I ran into an issue using secure values in my playbook, more accurate, I didn't understand how to use it correctly.
Compared to Chef-Infra, you could use data_bags in order to store your secure credentials.
You create a data bag:
knife data bag create testDataBag
You would create a json file for a data bag item:
{
"id": "preproduction",
"user": "user1",
"password": "this-is-a-password"
}
Upload it to the Chef server while encrypting it with a secret file (which exists the target server):
knife data bag from file testDataBag .\testDataBag\preproduction.json --secret-file .\secret-file
and then you can use it in your cookbook:
userinfo = data_bag_item('testDataBag', preproduction)
userinfo['user'] # "user1"
userinfo['password'] # "this-is-a-password"
An example use case - configuring the password for a Linux user.
userinfo = data_bag_item('testDataBag', preproduction)
user "#{userinfo['user']}" do
comment 'A random user'
home "/home/#{userinfo['user']}"
shell '/bin/bash'
password "userinfo['password']"
end
I know this is a lot of information but I just wanted to show how I'm used to use secure credentials.
Back to Ansible, I understood there is an ansible-vault tool which I can used to encrypt a variable file that later can be used in a playbook.
Sadly the only examples I've seen (or maybe I just didn't notice) include only running playbooks from the command line which is not something I do.
I have a playbook in my GIT repository which is connected to a project in my Ansible Tower.
What do I need to do in order to get to the point I can use a variable which contains the password?
Encryption is the same? by using ansible-vault?
Where do I store the encrypted files? (Specifically in Ansible Tower)
How to store the vault passwords (the one you use to decrypt a vault-id)?
How to access them in my playbook?
I've looked into those links but I couldn't find anything interesting:
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/vault.html
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/playbooks_vault.html
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/playbooks_best_practices.html#variables-and-vaults
And in the Ansible Tower documentation there is no explanation on how and where to store your vault-ids.
If anymore information is needed please tell me, I'll update my post.
Thanks everyone!
As far as I know you have two options to achieve this in AWX/Tower, depending on where you want those secrets stored.
Creating a vault within your project/GIT repo
Use "ansible-vault create" command and select a password
Save the credentials within the vault in yaml format and commit/push the changes to git
On your playbook add an include_vars to your vault file and commit/push to git
In Tower create a credential, select type=Vault and add the password for your vault
On your Tower template add the credential you created earlier
Use a custom credential type (this will not save the creds in git at all, they will just live on Tower/AWX)
Create a new custom credential type with an injector configuration type of "extra_vars" and the credentials you want to include as variables in your playbook.
Then create a credential based on the new credential type you created in the previous step.
Now assign that credential to your template, and those variables will just be available in your playbook run.
Here are the details on how to create a custom credential type
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible-tower/latest/html/userguide/credential_types.html
Assume that a normal deployment script does a lot of things and many of them are related to preparing the OS itself.
These tasks are taking a LOT of time to run even if there is nothing new to do and I want to prevent running them more often than, let's say once a day.
I know that I can use tags to filter what I am running but that's not the point: I need to make ansible aware that these "sections" executed successfully one hour ago and due to this, it would skip the entire block now.
I was expecting that caching of facts was supposed to do this but somehow I wasnt able to see any read case.
You need to figure out how to determine what "executed successfully" means. Is is just that a given playbook ran to completion? Certain roles ran to completion? Certain indicators exist that allow you determine success?
As you mention, I don't think fact caching is going to help you here unless you want to introduce custom facts into each host (http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/playbooks_variables.html#local-facts-facts-d)
I typically come up with a set of variables/facts that indicate a role has already been run. Sometimes this involves making shell calls and registering vars, looking at gathered facts and determining if certain files exist. My typical pattern for a role looks something like this
roles/my_role/main.yml
- name: load facts
include: facts.yml
- name: run config tasks if needed
include: config.yml
when: fact_var1 and fact_vars2 and inv_var1 and reg_var1
You could also dynamically write a yaml variable file that get's included in your playbooks and contains variables about the configured state of your environment. This is a more global option and doesn't really work if you need to look at the configured status of individual machines. An extension of this would be to write status variables to host_vars or group_vars inventory variable files. These would get loaded automatically on a host by host basis.
Unfortunately, as far as I know, fact caching only caches host based facts such as those created by the setup module so wouldn't allow you to use set_fact to register a fact that, for example, a role had been completed and then conditionally check for that at the start of the role.
Instead you might want to consider using Ansible with another product to orchestrate it in a more complex fashion.
Imagine a server setup with Ansible with a production and a reference system/cluster and a separate server running Ansible (with ssh-keys). The different clusters are identified in two inventory files.
Every playbook usage will somehow look like ansible-playbook -i production ... or ansible-playbook -i reference....
How do I prevent an accidental usage of the production inventory?
This could happen easily by either using an history entry in the shell or copy the command from some documentation.
Some ideas:
As a start every documentation is referring to the reference inventory and is also using --check.
Use two different Ansible instances and the common part is mirrored via Git. But this will result in some overhead.
Prompt once for i.e. database passwords and use different on production and reference. But not all task/tags have such a password requirement.
Actually I'm looking for something like a master password when using a specific inventory? Or a task that is always executed even if a tag is used? What is the best practice here? Do you have other ideas? Or am I somehow totally wrong here and there is a better way for my scenario?
Your production inventory could either be vaulted or even just include a vaulted file (which doesn't actually have to contain anything).
This will mean that when you attempt to run:
ansible-playbook -i production playbook.yml
It will fail with a message telling you to pass a vault password to it.
The vault password could be something simple such as "pr0duct10n" so it's entire purpose is to remind people that they are about to run it in production and so to think things through (much like how many people use a sudo password).
I have been looking into Ansible vault but want to check something incase I have missed a crucial point.
Do you have to run the playbook and provide the password. Encrypting the data seems a great idea but if I share the playbook the person running it will require the password. If they have the password then they can decrypt the file and see the data.
I would like to use it to set passwords for files but would like non admins to be able to run the playbook.
Have I missed something. I am struggling to see its worth if this is the case.
Thanks
The purpose of the vault is to keep secrets encrypted "at rest" (eg, in your source control repo, on-disk), so that someone can't learn the secrets by getting ahold of the content. As others have mentioned, if you want to delegate use of the secrets without divulging them, you'll need an intermediary like Tower.
In your case you need something that will be brokering ansible execution. Because like you've said an encryption would be useless if you share the password.
Like it's mentioned in the comment you can use Ansible Tower, or you can try and set a simple http endpoint that will be trigerring ansible based on specified parameters.
My current Ansible project is setup like so:
backup-gitlab.yml
roles/
aws_backups/
tasks/
main.yml
backup-vm.yml
gitlab/
tasks/
main.yml
start.yml
stop.yml
backup-gitlab.yml needs to do the following:
Invoke stop.yml on the gitlab host.
Invoke backup-gitlab.yml on a different host.
Invoke start.yml on the gitlab host.
The problem I'm running into is Ansible doesn't seem to support a way of choosing which task files to run within the same role in the same playbook. Before I was using tags to control what Ansible would do, but in this case tagging the include statements for start.yml and stop.yml doesn't work because Ansible doesn't appear to have a way to dynamically change the applied tags that are run once they are set through the command line.
I can't come up with an elegant way to achieve this.
Some options are:
Have each task file be contained within its own role. This is annoying because I will end up with a million roles that are not grouped in any way. It's essentially abandoning the whole 'role' concept.
Use include with hard coded paths. This is prone to error as things move around. Also, since Ansible deprecated combining with_items with include (or using any sort of dynamic looping with include), I can no longer quickly change up the task files being run. Any minor change in my workflow requires lots of coding changes. I would really like to stick with using tags from the command line to control exactly what Ansible does.
Use shell scripts to invoke separate Ansible playbooks.
Use conditionals (when clause) on every single Ansible action, and control what gets run by setting variables. While several people have recommended this on SO, it sounds awful. I will have to add the conditional to hundreds of actions and every time I run a playbook the output will be cluttered by hundred's of 'skip' statements.
Leverage Jinja templates and ansible's local_connection to dynamically build static main.yml files with all the required task files included in the proper order (using computed relative paths). Then invoke that computed main.yml file. This is dangerous and convoluted.
Use top level Ansible plays to invoke lower level plays. Seems messy, also this brings in problems when I need to pass variables between plays. Using Ansible's Python Api may help this.
Ansible strives to bring VMs into idempotent states but this isn't very helpful and is a dated way of thinking in my opinion (I would have stuck with Chef if that is all I wanted). I want to leverage Ansible to actually do things such as: actively change configuration states, kick off processes, monitor events, react to events, etc. Essentially I want it to automate as much of my job as possible. The current 'role' structure (with static configurations) that Ansible recommends doesn't fit this paradigm very well even though their usage of remote command execution via SSH gets us so close to the dream.
Just use a playbook for these types of management tasks.
Granted the skip statements do somewhat clutter the output. If you wish to fix that you can further breakdown the roles into something like aws_backups-setup and aws_backups-managment.
Also the roles documentation has some information on how you can run pre_tasks and post_tasks on roles.