Prompts
=======

.. contents::
   :depth: 2

You may wish to prompt the user for certain input, and can
do so with the similarly named 'vars_prompt' section.  

A common use for this might be for sensitive data.

This has uses beyond security, for instance, you may use the same playbook for all
software releases and would prompt for a particular release version
in a push-script::

    ---
    - hosts: all
      remote_user: root
      vars:
        from: "camelot"
      vars_prompt:
        name: "what is your name?"
        quest: "what is your quest?"
        favcolor: "what is your favorite color?"

There are full examples of both of these items in the github examples/playbooks directory.

If you have a variable that changes infrequently, it might make sense to
provide a default value that can be overridden.  This can be accomplished using
the default argument::

   vars_prompt:
     - name: "release_version"
       prompt: "Product release version"
       default: "1.0"

An alternative form of vars_prompt allows for hiding input from the user, and may later support
some other options, but otherwise works equivalently::

   vars_prompt:
     - name: "some_password"
       prompt: "Enter password"
       private: yes
     - name: "release_version"
       prompt: "Product release version"
       private: no

If `Passlib <http://pythonhosted.org/passlib/>`_ is installed, vars_prompt can also crypt the
entered value so you can use it, for instance, with the user module to define a password::

   vars_prompt:
     - name: "my_password2"
       prompt: "Enter password2"
       private: yes
       encrypt: "md5_crypt"
       confirm: yes
       salt_size: 7

You can use any crypt scheme supported by 'Passlib':

- *des_crypt* - DES Crypt
- *bsdi_crypt* - BSDi Crypt
- *bigcrypt* - BigCrypt
- *crypt16* - Crypt16
- *md5_crypt* - MD5 Crypt
- *bcrypt* - BCrypt
- *sha1_crypt* - SHA-1 Crypt
- *sun_md5_crypt* - Sun MD5 Crypt
- *sha256_crypt* - SHA-256 Crypt
- *sha512_crypt* - SHA-512 Crypt
- *apr_md5_crypt* - Apache’s MD5-Crypt variant
- *phpass* - PHPass’ Portable Hash
- *pbkdf2_digest* - Generic PBKDF2 Hashes
- *cta_pbkdf2_sha1* - Cryptacular’s PBKDF2 hash
- *dlitz_pbkdf2_sha1* - Dwayne Litzenberger’s PBKDF2 hash
- *scram* - SCRAM Hash
- *bsd_nthash* - FreeBSD’s MCF-compatible nthash encoding

However, the only parameters accepted are 'salt' or 'salt_size'. You can use you own salt using
'salt', or have one generated automatically using 'salt_size'. If nothing is specified, a salt
of size 8 will be generated.

.. seealso::

   :doc:`playbooks`
       An introduction to playbooks
   :doc:`playbooks_conditionals`
       Conditional statements in playbooks
   :doc:`playbooks_variables`
       All about variables
   `User Mailing List <http://groups.google.com/group/ansible-devel>`_
       Have a question?  Stop by the google group!
   `irc.freenode.net <http://irc.freenode.net>`_
       #ansible IRC chat channel