How to view/decrypt Ansible vault credentials files from within a Python script?

user_33204 0
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I'm trying to figure out how to provide the following facilities to a Python script so that it can:

  1. Import Ansible Python modules
  2. Open up my defined ansible.cfg and read vault_password_file variable
  3. Read vault_password_file and temporarily store in a Python variable
  4. Decrypt a referenced Ansible vaulted file

I found this code via google but it did not appear to work when I tried it:

import ansible.utils

bar = dict()

bar = ansible.utils._load_vars_from_path("secrets.yml", results=bar, vault_password="password")

print bar

Throws this error:

$ python ansible-vault-ex.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "ansible-vault-ex.py", line 5, in <module>
    bar = ansible.utils._load_vars_from_path("credentials.vault", results=bar, vault_password="password")
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute '_load_vars_from_path'

When I investigated this I saw no indications of this function in any Ansible related files, leading me to believe that this method no longer worked with some newer version(s) of Ansible.

Bottom line is that I'd like some method for importing Ansible libraries/modules from a Python script, so that I can interact with ansible-vault managed files programmatically from Python.

ansible-vault ansible encryption python
7 Answers

If you have configured a vault_password_file in ansible.cfg, you can pass the password to VaultLib as followed

Import :

from ansible import constants as C
from ansible.parsing.vault import VaultLib
from ansible.cli import CLI
from ansible.parsing.dataloader import DataLoader

And then, you can call :

loader = DataLoader()
vault_secret = CLI.setup_vault_secrets(
    loader=loader,
    vault_ids=C.DEFAULT_VAULT_IDENTITY_LIST
)
vault = VaultLib(vault_secret)
vault.decrypt(open('/path/to/vault.yml').read())
user_94174760

Extending Kuba's answer, ansible-vault is a wrapper around VaultLib. It nicely handles the pre Ansible 2.4 version of Vaultlib along with the post 2.4 version.

The ansible-vault load() method not only decrypts the file, but it also parses it and returns the contents as a dict. If you want the contents without parsing, it is probably easiest to just extend ansible-vault with something like:

from ansible_vault import Vault

class MyVault(Vault):
    def load_raw(self, stream):
        return self.vault.decrypt(stream)

    def dump_raw(self, text, stream=None):
        encrypted = self.vault.encrypt(text)
        if stream:
            stream.write(encrypted)
        else:
            return encrypted
user_4187980

broferek's answer works if your entire yaml file is encrypted. if your yaml file is unencrypted but contains encrypted variables, it'll complain. This should work either way:

import:

from ansible import constants as C
from ansible.cli import CLI
from ansible.parsing.vault import VaultLib
from ansible.parsing.dataloader import DataLoader

then use the DataLoader class to read the file in to a dict

cfgfile = "/path/to/yaml/file.yml"
loader = DataLoader()
vault_secrets = CLI.setup_vault_secrets(loader=loader,
            vault_ids=C.DEFAULT_VAULT_IDENTITY_LIST)
loader.set_vault_secrets(vault_secrets)
data = loader.load_from_file(cfgfile)
pprint.pprint(data)
user_121103240

I couldn't get the decryption working with the above answers but I do have a function here that uses subprocess and works well:

def vault_decrypt(text, vault_password_file):
    """
    Calls ansible vault and pass the payload via stdin
    :param text: str, text to decode
    :param vault_password_file: str, vault password
    :return: str, decoded text
    """
    cmd = ['ansible-vault', 'decrypt', '--vault-password-file={}'.format(vault_password_file)]
    p = Popen(cmd,
              stdout=PIPE, stdin=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)
    output = p.communicate(input=str.encode(text))
    return output[0].decode("utf-8")

If I do update it to use the ansible python module directly I'll update. Cheers.

user_20233920
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