Mixing encrypted data with plain YAML

Before the release of Ansible 2.3, secure data had to be encrypted in a separate file. For the reasons we discussed earlier, it is desirable to encrypt as little data as possible. This is now possible (and also saves a need for too many individual files as part of a playbook) through the use of the encrypt_string subcommand of ansible-vault, which produces an encrypted string that can be placed into an Ansible YAML file. Let's start with the following basic playbook as an example:

---
- name: inline secret variable demonstration
  hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: false
  vars:
    my_secret: secure_password
  tasks:
    - name: print the secure variable
      ansible.builtin.debug:
        var: my_secret

We can run this code (insecure though it is!) with the following command:

ansible...