Ansible to generate random passwords automatically for users

Question

I am trying to create playbook where list of users will be created.

However, I also want to generate random password for each user. Once the passwords are generated, I would like to have a text file holding username:new_generated_password key values, next to the playbook file. Is it possible to do this without developing a new module?

Answer 1

The password lookup can generate passwords for you and puts the generated password on the control machine (i.e. where the playbook is running). An example task that creates a user and sets their password may look something like this:

- name: Create users with auto generated password
  user:
    name: "{{ item.name }}"
    password: "{{ lookup('password', 'credentials/' + item.name + '/password.txt encrypt=md5_crypt') }}"
  with_items: users

This would then create a text file named ~/credentials/$username/password.txt on the control machine. If you were to rerun the Ansible play then Ansible would recognise that filepath as the password and make sure to set the user's password to that same value - making it idempotent.

This doesn't get you quite what you wanted but gets all the information that you needed on to the Ansible control host so you could then further manipulate it to get the final output that you wanted.