Ansible Tower (AWX) - using secure variables in a playbook? - ansible

Question

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!

Answer 1

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