Bitwarden Secrets Manager Collection

Securely retrieve secrets from Bitwarden Secrets Manager and use them in your Ansible playbooks.

Getting started

Install dependencies

The Bitwarden Secrets Manager Collection requires the bitwarden-sdk package. You can install it by running the following command:

pip install bitwarden-sdk

Install the collection

You can install the Bitwarden Secrets Manager Collection by running:

ansible-galaxy collection install bitwarden.secrets

Update your playbook

Before running your playbook, you need to set the BWS_ACCESS_TOKEN environment variable:

# the line below will prevent lines with leading spaces from being saved to bash history
export HISTCONTROL=ignorespace

# the space in the line below keeps your access token out of bash history
 export BWS_ACCESS_TOKEN=<your_access_token>

Alternatively, you may supply the access token as a parameter to the bitwarden.secrets.lookup plugin:

- name: A simple example
  hosts: localhost

  vars_prompt:
  - name: "your_access_token"
    prompt: "Enter your Bitwarden access token"
    private: yes

  vars:
    some_secret: "{{ lookup('bitwarden.secrets.lookup', '<your_secret_id>', access_token=your_access_token) }}"

Note

We are using a vars_prompt to avoid storing the access token in the playbook. While there are many ways to pass the access token to the lookup plugin, we recommend against storing it in the playbook itself.

For more information on how to use the Bitwarden Secrets Manager Collection, see the documentation.

Run your playbook

Once you've updated your playbook to use the Bitwarden Secrets Manager lookup plugin, you can run it with the ansible-playbook command:

ansible-playbook <path_to_your_playbook.yml>

macOS

If your Ansible controller is running macOS, you may need to set the following environment variable to avoid an error related to fork safety:

export OBJC_DISABLE_INITIALIZE_FORK_SAFETY=YES

See running on macos as a control node and this GitHub issue for more details.