How to set password for user in Ansible

Ansible is used for different purposes. Sometimes it’s a core business process where you need to follow all possible best practices and more. Sometimes it’s knock-off script for laboratory environments where you are completely fineto store passwords in the git. If those environments are protected against simple probing bots, that’s enough.

And sometimes one need to give access to labs to number of people. If list of those people is not explicitly known, ssh keys are inconvenient. Account with password is the best for that.

Ansible can set password, but it aims for best practices. Here I’m demoting it to convenience.

How to set a password for a user’s account stored in a plain-text form in the inventory/or group variables?

- name: Set root password
   user:
    name: root
    password: '{{root_password|password_hash("sha512", "{{salt}}") }}'

root_password has a plain-text password for user ‘root’, (f.e. “iHbs2Seneab”)

salt stores any value. (f.e. “mysaltvalue”).

Insecure? Yes. Convenient? Yes.