Prompts ======= 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 `_ 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.