Creating and editing encrypted files

To create new files, Ansible provides a program called ansible-vault. This program is used to create and interact with Vault-encrypted files. The subcommand to create encrypted files is create, and you can see the options available under this subcommand by running the following command:

ansible-vault create --help

The output of this command is shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 3.1 – The options available when creating an Ansible Vault instance

To create a new file, you'll need to know two things ahead of time. The first is the password ansible-vault will be using to encrypt the file, and the second is the filename itself. Once provided with this information, ansible-vault will launch a text editor (as defined in the EDITOR environment variable—this defaults to vi or vim in many cases). Once you save the file and exit the editor, ansible-vault will use the supplied password as a key to encrypt...