Ansible Plugin
A collection of Ansible plugins that interact with your Keeper account and can be used in your automations.
Last updated
A collection of Ansible plugins that interact with your Keeper account and can be used in your automations.
Last updated
Retrieve secrets from the Keeper vault to use in Ansible Playbooks
Update the value of secrets in the Keeper Vault from Ansible
Create records from Ansible
Copy files from the Keeper Vault
For a complete list of Keeper Secrets Manager features see the Overview
This page documents the Secrets Manager Ansible integration. In order to utilize this integration, you will need:
Keeper Secrets Manager access (See the Quick Start Guide for more details)
Secrets Manager add-on enabled for your Keeper account
Membership in a Role with the Secrets Manager enforcement policy enabled
A Keeper Secrets Manager Application with secrets shared to it
See the Quick Start Guide for instructions on creating an Application
An initialized Keeper Secrets Manager Configuration
The Ansible integration accepts both Base64 and JSON format configurations
Due to the flexibility of Ansible, where you install the plugins depends on your Ansible installation and playbook locations.
The collection can be found on the Ansible Galaxy website. You can install the collection with the follow command line.
Ansible Galaxy collection uses long plugin names. The name is the collection name combined with the plugin name. For example, the keeper_copy plugin name when using Ansible Galaxy is keeper_security.keeper_secrets_manager.keeper_copy. If you want to use the short plugin name, add keepersecurity.keeper_secrets_manager to the collections block of your playbook.
Installing via Ansible Galaxy assumes you already have Ansible installed. Ansible Galaxy cannot install dependencies. The following dependencies will need to be installed manually, via pip, into your the python library or virtualenv used by Ansible.
importlib_metadata
keeper-secrets-manager-core>=16.4.1
keeper-secrets-manager-helper>=1.0.4
The Ansible module for Keeper is installed with the command below. Make note of the location where the module is installed, as this will be needed in the Ansible playbook configuration.
Find the Keeper Secrets Manager Ansible Plugin source code in the GitHub repository.
The Keeper ansible plugins are installed in the site-packages directory of your version of Python or your current virtual environment. You can find the plugin locations using the following command:
Those paths can be used in your ansible.cfg.
Prior to proceeding with this guide, make sure you meet all the prerequisites and have the following:
KSM Application and it's One-Time Access Token
Keeper Ansible module installed
In order to use the Ansible plugin for Keeper Secrets Manager, a Keeper config file is required. Once you have a config file, the configuration values can be placed into the Ansible variable files. These variable files can be encrypted with Ansible vault.
Using the Keeper Ansible module and the generated One-Time Access Token, generate a Configuration file:
This will generate the Keeper JSON configuration file in the current directory.
If you do not have your Python module bin path added your PATH environment variable, you can create a config with the following command.
The default name for the JSON configuration file is client-config.json. The content of the file will look like the following:
This config file allows your Ansible playbook to authenticate and retrieve designated secrets from the vault.
The Keeper Secrets Manager plugins can use multiple configuration methods. For example, the Base64 encode configuration can be used.
Ansible can use the client-config.json config file directly. It can be specified in the Ansible variables using the keeper_config_file variable key.
Another solution is to place the values in your client-config.json file into an Ansible variable file. For example, the values can be placed into the group_vars, host_vars, or in the task files:
For security, the group_vars or host_vars files can be encrypted with ansible-vault.
A list of valid Ansible Variables for the Keeper plugin are below:
Ansible Variable
JSON Key
Description
keeper_config
--
A Base64 encoded configuration string.
keeper_config_file
--
An alternative path and name for the JSON configuration file, if not current directory or named differently than client-config.json.
keeper_token
clientKey
The one time access token, also known as the client key. Only used to initialize the configuration.
keeper_client_id
clientId
The client id provided from Secrets Manager after the one time access token is used. Required.
keeper_app_key
appKey
The app key provided from the secret management service after the one time access token is used. Required.
keeper_private_key
privateKey
The private key provided from the secret management service after the one time access token is used. Required.
keeper_app_owner_public_key
appOwnerPublicKey
The public key used for creating records. Required if using the keeper_create plugin.
keeper_server_public_key_id
serverPublicKeyId
Selects which public key to use when connecting to the server. If the server wants a different public key the SDK will handle switching. Not required, but will reduce number of web service calls.
keeper_hostname
hostname
The Secrets Manager backend hostname. Defaults to US. Supports "US", "EU", "AU" and "US_GOV" values depending on your Keeper data center location. Required.
keeper_log_level
--
Set the log level of the SDK. Acceptable levels are DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR, and CRITICAL. Defaults to ERROR.
keeper_record_cache_secret
--
Required for the keeper_cache_records action. Used to encrypt records in cache. The value of this variable can be created in the playbook. See action example.
keeper_use_cache
--
Use a cache of the vault. Defaults to False. Cache file are only used as backup for network problems.
keeper_cache_dir
--
The directory to write and read the cache file.
keeper_record_types
--
An list of Keeper Commander record type definitions.
There are two caching methods in the plugin. They are not the same.
keeper_record_cache_secret is used to cache records for a playbook run. After the playbook run, the cache is removed. The cache is stored in memory encrypted. This cache can be used to reduce the number of API called to the Keeper Secret Manager service. Since this cache is stored in memory, the more records retrieved the more memory is used.
keeper_use_cache and keeper_cache_dir are used for Disaster Recovery caching of the Keeper Vault. This cached is used when connection to the Keeper Secret Manager service cannot be reached. This cache is stored encrypted on disk.
As an optional method, values can be passed in through the ansible-playbook command. Example:
There are three Keeper action plugins and one lookup plugin.
For all the plugins, the following arguments are used. Either the uid or title is required.
uid - The Record UID of the desired record.
title - The Record Title of the desired record.
field - Retrieve the value with specified label from the record.
custom_field - Retrieve the value with the specific custom field name.
file - Retrieve the file with the specified name from the record.
The uid value is required, and you need either field or file populated.
To find out what fields and custom fields are available for a specific vault secret, use the Keeper Secrets Manager CLI "ksm secret get -u XXXX" command. More info here.
The plugin example are shown with the short plugin names. If you installed the collection via Ansible Galaxy, you will need to use the longer plugin name or add the collection name to the list of collections used in your playbook.
Actions can either use Keeper Notation or the record UID or Title, combined with the task attributes array_index and value_key to get a specific value.
For example, a complex value like Phone number is an array of objects.
The example, below is show how to use Keeper Notation and array_index and value_key to get the same result.
The plugin keeper_cache_records is used to retrieve a select amount of records to be stored in a cache. The cache can then be used by other actions. This is used to reduce the number of API calls by getting all required record up front.
The records can be retrieved by the record UID or by the record title. The result of the action is an encrypted serialization of the records. The result should be stored in Ansible by using the register variable so it can be used by other actions. The encrypted serialization of the records can be quite long. For security and reducing log noise, it is recommended to set no_log to True.
keeper_cache_records caches records only. It does not cache attached files. If an action attempts to retrieve an attached file from a record that came from the cache, an API call will be made to download the file.
Use templating to set the attributes in other actions. For example cache: "{{ my_records.cache }}"
keeper_cache_records requires the keeper_record_cache_secret to be set. This can be done in the host, group, task variables, or generated in a task and then set as a fact (variable). In the example above, the keeper_password action is used to generate a password which is then stored as keeper_record_cache_secret. The no_log attribute is set to True to prevent the secret from being logged.
The cache will not update. The cache will not contain records created or updated after it has been generated. To get new records or changes in the cache, keeper_cache_records will need to be called again.
uids - A list of Keeper Vault record UID.
titles - A list of titles of Keeper Vault records.
The attributes uids and titles can be used at the same time. At least one of them needs to be set.
keeper_copyThe plugin keeper_copy is an extension of the built-in copy plugin. Example:
In the examples, a password will be copied from the Keeper vault record and stored in the file /tmp/my_password on the remote system. It will use the Ansbile built-in copy plugin's mode attributes to changed the permissions of the file.
The last task example from above, the file "my_cert_file.crt" will be coped from the Keeper vault record and stored at the location "/tmp/special.crt". Several of the built-in copy plugin functions will be applied to the file.
uid - A Keeper Vault record UID.
title - Title of a Keeper Vault records.
notation - Use Keeper Notation to get the field from a record.
The attributes uids and titles can be used at the same time. At least one of them needs to be set.
cache - The record cache from the keeper_cache_records action.
field - Get the content from the standard Keeper Vault record.
custom_field - Get the content from the custom Keeper Vault record.
file - Get the content from the files attach to the Keeper Vault record by file title.
array_index - Defaults to 0. If the field value contains multiple values, this attribute will allow you to select which item to return. The first item will have the array_index of 0, and the next will be 1, etc.
value_key - If the field value is a complex object, this will allow you to select the key of the key/value pair to return.
Additional optional attributes are the same as the built-in copy plugin attributes. The attributes src, remote_src, and content are not allowed and will be ignored.
keeper_getThe plugin keeper_get will retrieve a field or file from a Keeper vault record. Example:
The keeper_get plugin returns a dictionary. The key "value" in the dictionary will contain the desired field or file content. This plugin is normally paired with the Ansible register instruction and the returned value is stored in memory so it can be accessed by other tasks.
In the example above, a record containing user's login name is retrieved. The login name is then stored under the name my_login. The second task will print the login name to your console for debug purposes. The third task will add a sudoer file for the login name with ability to execute all applications.
uid - A Keeper Vault record UID.
title - Title of a Keeper Vault records.
notation - Use Keeper Notation to get the field from a record.
The attributes uids and titles can be used at the same time. At least one of them needs to be set.
cache - The record cache from the keeper_cache_records action.
field - Get the value from the standard Keeper Vault record.
custom_field - Get the value from the custom Keeper Vault record.
file - Get the value from the files attach to the Keeper Vault record by file title.
allow_array - By default is False. If set to True, an array of values will be returned. This is needed if the field contains multiple values such as Phone numbers. If True, array_index and value_key will be ignored.
array_index - Defaults to 0. If the field value contains multiple values, this attribute will allow you to select which item to return. The first item will have the array_index of 0, and the next will be 1, etc.
value_key - If the field value is a complex object, this will allow you to select the key of the key/value pair to return.
keeper_get_recordThe plugin keeper_get_record will retrieve all the fields in the record and return them in a dictionary. Example:
The keeper_get_record plugin returns a dictionary. The keys of the dictionary are the normalized field labels, or types. The keys will be alphanumeric and the underscore characters. If there are duplicate key, a number will be appended to the end of the key.
In the example above, a record is retrieved using the UID. The fields will be stored in a dictionary, in memory, using the register instruction. Since the allow attribute is used, the dictionary will only contain login and password .The field values can be accessed using the normal the templating in Ansible. The values will be stored as arrays. This is due to some fields returning arrays of the values, such as phone.
uid - A Keeper Vault record UID.
title - Title of a Keeper Vault records.
Either uids and titles is required.
cache - The record cache from the keeper_cache_records action.
allow - A list of keys to allow. If set, if the key is not in the list, it will not be inclued in the dictionary.
keeper_setThe keeper_set plugin has the ability to write a value into an existing Keeper vault record. Example:
In this example, a new user's login name is retreived. The new user is created on the remote system with the login name from the record. The home directory on the remote machine is then updated in the record.
The keeper_set action does not have the ability of set individual values of an array or complex values. It simplely replaces the existing value with a new value. For example, for a Hostname and Port field type there is no way to just update the port. The entire value including the hostName needs to be included in the object value.
keeper_set will set the update the record in the vault. It will not update the cache, if used. To update the cache, a step will need to run the keeper_cache_records action again with the UID or Title of the record that was updated.
uid - A Keeper Vault record UID.
title - Title of a Keeper Vault records.
notation - Use Keeper Notation to get the field from a record.
The attributes uids and titles can be used at the same time. At least one of them needs to be set.
cache - The record cache. Used for getting the record, will not update the cache.
field - Update the existing standard Keeper Vault record field.
custom_field - Update the existing custom Keeper Vault record field.
keeper_createThe keeper_create plugin creates a record in the Keeper vault. See the Field/Record Types document for available record types, and the field types used to build the records. The action plugin will return the record_uid upon successful creation.
The Ansible variable keeper_app_owner_public_key is required to create a record. In the client-config.json, the JSON key is appOwnerPublicKey. If your configuration does not contain this key, create a new One-Time Access Token and initialize it.
Example:
The following fields are required.
shared_folder_uid - The Shared Folder UID from the vault. The record will be created within this folder.
record_type - The type of record. This will included all the default record types. If the keeper_record_types is set, those record types can be used.
title - The title of record
The following fields are optional.
generate_password - If set to true, any password field where the password has not been set, will be populated with a random generated password.
password_complexity - Sets the complexity of the password. All parameters of password_complexity are optional.
length - Length of password. Defaults to 64.
allow_lowercase - Defaults to True. If set to False, no lowercase letters will be used.
allow_uppercase - Defaults to True. If set to False, no uppercase letters will be used.
allow_digits - Defaults to True. If set to False, no digits will be used.
allow_symbols - Defaults to True. If set to False, no symbols will be used.
filter_characters - A list of characters to exclude from the password. This allows to remove characters a services will reject. For example, '%' in SQL. If not set, the password will not be filtered.
notes - Attach a note to the record.
Password generation will use the following symbols: "!@#$%()+;<>=?[]{}^.,
Based on the Record Types, certain fields maybe required. Custom fields are optional. Both fields and custom_fields are an array of values.
fields/custom_fields
type - Field type
label - Label to display with the value.
value - Field value. Can be a string or dictionary based on field type.
To create a record with a particular Custom Record Type, first export the custom record types using Keeper Commander and the record-type-info command. KSM does not sync down the custom type definitions, so this must be added directly to the playbook as a variable.
Keeper Commander will output a JSON Array ("content"). Only the JSON object is required.
Example:
In your Ansible YAML file, add the value of the "content" object to the variable key called keeper_record_types. The variable is an array, and the JSON is to be treated as a string value. The pipe, after the array item, will treat the following JSON as a string. The variable will accept multiple record types.
Example:
To check if this worked, the keeper_info plugin can be used to show which record types are available.
When creating a record of a particular custom type, the Ansible task will reference the record type name in the record_type parameter as seen below:
keeper_removev1.2.1 Released on: 10/27/2023
The keeper_remove plugin will remove a record from the Keeper vault.
uid - A Keeper Vault record UID.
title - Title of a Keeper Vault records.
The attributes uid and title cannot be used at the same time. At least one of them needs to be set.
cache - The record cache from the keeper_cache_records action. The record will not be removed from the cache. The cache will be used for looking up the record title.
keeper_passwordThe keeper_password plugin will generate a random password. The action plugin will return the password.
Example:
All parameters are optional. If no parameters are set, the defaults will be used.
length - Length of password. Defaults to 64.
allow_lowercase - Defaults to True. If set to False, no lowercase letters will be used.
allow_uppercase - Defaults to True. If set to False, no uppercase letters will be used.
allow_digits - Defaults to True. If set to False, no digits will be used.
allow_symbols - Defaults to True. If set to False, no symbols will be used.
filter_characters - A list of characters to exclude from the password. This allows to remove characters a services will reject. For example, '%' in SQL. If not set, the password will not be filtered.
Password generation will use the following symbols: "!@#$%()+;<>=?[]{}^.,
Based of record types, certain fields maybe required. Custom fields are optional. Both fields and custom_field are an array of values.
keeper_lookupThe keeper_lookup plugin retrieves a field from the Keeper vault record and inserts the value into a text string. Example:
In the example above, the first task the content of a file is created by templating the login name of a user from a Keeper record.
The second task displays as debug the second phone of number from a field with a complex value using the array_index and value_key task attributes. An array_index starts at 0, the next item in the araray will be 1, the next is 2, a so on. The value_key is the name of key in a key/pair dictionary.
uid - A Keeper Vault record UID.
title - Title of a Keeper Vault records.
notation - Use Keeper Notation to get the field from a record.
The attributes uids and titles can be used at the same time. At least one of them needs to be set.
cache - The record cache. Used for getting multiple records, will not update the cache.
field - Update the existing standard Keeper Vault record field.
custom_field - Update the existing custom Keeper Vault record field.
file - Get the value from the files attach to the Keeper Vault record by file title.
allow_array - By default is False. If set to True, an array of values will be returned. This is needed if the field contains multiple values such as Phone numbers. If True, array_index and value_key will be ignored.
array_index - Defaults to 0. If the field value contains multiple values, this attribute will allow you to select which item to return. The first item will have the array_index of 0, and the next will be 1, etc.
value_key - If the field value is a complex object, this will allow you to select the key of the key/value pair to return.
To avoid leaking secret values when using the lookup plugin, add 'no_log: True' to the task. The stdout information will not be logged if the value is True.
If the plugin was installed by Ansible Galaxy the longer name is required for the lookup plugin (i.e. keepersecurity.keeper_secrets_manager.keeper). Listing collections appears not to work with lookup plugins.
To find out what fields and custom fields are available for a specific vault secret, use the Keeper Secrets Manager CLI "ksm secret get -u XXXX" command. More info here.
keeper_initThe keeper_init plugin initialize a configuration from a one time access token. This is similar to the keeper_ansible --keeper_token command. The plugin accepts the following options.
token - The one time access token. It's best to template this value and pass in the value.
filename - The configuration file name to generate with config values. If not included, the configuration will not be created.
show_config - A flag to indicate if the configuration values should be returned in the task log. By default this is False. Only set to True if you are unable to generate the configuration via other methods or do not have access to a generated configuration file. If True, the configuration will be logged. This might not be a problem if running the playbook via the command line, however if running via Ansible Tower to will be log file which is retained.
It's best not to hard code the token into the playbook since it's only good once. The token and the configuration file name can be passed into the playbook using the extra vars.
The above will generate a file similar to the one below. The content of the file can be copied into a configuration file used by ansible, and optionally encrypted by ansible-vault.
If the Keeper Secret Manager plugins were installed via Ansible Galaxy, a role called keeper_init_token was installed to initialize the one-time access token. This role can be used in a playbook.
The role will use the following options set via extra variables.
keeper_token - Required one-time access token.
keeper_config_file - Generate a file containing the configuration. If not set, no file will be created.
keeper_show_config = Default False. If set to True, it will show the config in the log if verbosity is enabled.
Either keeper_config_file or keeper_show_config should be used, else the token will initialize and you will not be able to view the resulting configuration.
The keeper_info action will display information about the Keeper ansible plugin. The results include a list of record types, field types, and versions of Python modules. In order to see the results, the verbosity level needed to be set at 1 or higher.
This can be used to verify custom record types are being picked up by the plugins.
keeper_cleanupThe keeper_cleanup plugin is used to clean up any files created by the keeper plugins. This is mainly used to delete a cache file, if you are using it. Disaster Recovey cache files are used when there are network problems as a fall back to get records. If you are running Ansible secret environment, there is no need to remove the Disaster Recovey cache. However this plugin gives you the ability to do so.
keeper_redactThe keeper_redact stdout callback plugin is used to redact secrets from the standard out logs. This will work for the keeper_redact stdout callback plugin is used to redact secrets from the standard out logs. This will work for the keeper_copy and keeper_get plugins. It will not redact secret values for keeper_lookup. For keeper_lookup, use the no_log: True directive.
See How do I keep secrets data in my playbook? Using no_log can hide all logging from a task. This plugin is for when you just want secrets returned by the Keeper Secrets Manager plugins to be hidden/redacted.
The keeper_redact plugin will not work with Ansible Tower since it had its own stdout callback plugin to stream the log as the job runs. Highly recommend using the no_log option when you do not wish show information in the log.
To use the keeper_redact plugin, enable it in your ansible.cfg.
For example, the following task would return all the phone numbers in the custom field MyPhoneNumbers and place them into the variable phone_numbers.
If the playbook was run with any verbosity, the values being placed into the variable would be displayed. This would leak the secrets to the log. If the keeper_redact stdout callback plugin is enabled, the values in the log would be redacted.
You can use the Keeper Secret Manager CLI ("ksm") to provide the decryption password for your Ansible vaults. This is done using the ANSIBLE_VAULT_PASSWORD_FILE environment variable or the vault_password_file in the ansible.cfg field to specify an executable file that will return a password.
A executable shell script can be created that returns the password using the "ksm" secret notation (learn more about ksm secret notation). For example, the below script will output a specific secret password for the given Record UID:
Replace XXXX with the Vault Record UID. Running this script simply outputs the secret password.
To override the environmental variable "ANSIBLE_VAULT_PASSWORD_FILE", execute the following, replacing /path/to/script with the location of the above script.
Now, when Ansible needs to decrypt any vaults used by playbook_with_vault.yml, it will execute that shell script. The shell script will retrieve the password from the Keeper Vault.
By default, the Ansible plugins will only display errors. If you use the Ansible verbosity level, different SDK logging will be displayed. An Ansible verbosity level of -v will display any SDK messages INFO and higher, while a verbosity level of -vvv will display any SDK messages DEBUG and higher.
This appears to be specific to Ansible running on MacOS. While running a playbook you may get the following error:
This is known problem with Ansible. This can be fixed with the following environmental variable.