Creating a new user and password with Ansible

If you read Ansible's manual for user module, it'll direct you to the Ansible-examples github repo for details how to use password parameter.

There you'll see that your password must be hashed.

- hosts: all
  user: root
  vars:
    # created with:
    # python -c 'import crypt; print crypt.crypt("This is my Password", "$1$SomeSalt$")'
    password: $1$SomeSalt$UqddPX3r4kH3UL5jq5/ZI.

  tasks:
    - user: name=tset password={{password}}

If your playbook or ansible command line has your password as-is in plain text, this means your password hash recorded in your shadow file is wrong. That means when you try to authenticate with your password its hash will never match.

Additionally, see Ansible FAQ regarding some nuances of password parameter and how to correctly use it.

I may be too late to reply this but recently I figured out that jinja2 filters have the capability to handle the generation of encrypted passwords. In my main.yml I'm generating the encrypted password as:

- name: Creating user "{{ uusername }}" with admin access
  user: 
    name: {{ uusername }}
    password: {{ upassword | password_hash('sha512') }}
    groups: admin append=yes
  when:  assigned_role  == "yes"

- name: Creating users "{{ uusername }}" without admin access
  user:
    name: {{ uusername }}
    password: {{ upassword | password_hash('sha512') }}
  when:  assigned_role == "no"

- name: Expiring password for user "{{ uusername }}"
  shell: chage -d 0 "{{ uusername }}"

"uusername " and "upassword " are passed as --extra-vars to the playbook and notice I have used jinja2 filter here to encrypt the passed password.

I have added below tutorial related to this to my blog

• https://thinkingmonster.wordpress.com/it-automation/386-2/ansible-roles/