If you’d like to have a simple solution for managing all the secrets you’re using in your Ansible Playbooks, keep reading on. Bitwarden’s Secrets Manager provides an Ansible collection, which makes it very easy to use this particular Secrets Manager in Ansible Playbooks. I’ll show you how to set up a free Secrets Manager account in Bitwarden. Then I’ll walk you through the setup in an example Ansible Playbook.

YouTube Video version

I’ve also recorded a video version of this article. If you prefer a video, you can find it here.

Secrets Manager for Homelab

For a few years, I’ve been managing the configuration of a bunch of self-hosted services using Ansible Playbooks. Each playbook needed at least one secret — the sudo password. Many of them needed to manage more (e.g. SMTP credentials for email notifications). Because I’ve always been paranoid about security, I stored most of those secrets in Ansible Vault, the password for which is stored in only one location — my memory. Therefore, each time I ran any of those playbooks, I’d have to enter two passwords interactively: the sudo password and the Ansible Vault password.