vaultsearch is a Python 3 script that uses built-in Python and Ansible modules to recursively search for given terms in all found vault files.

If you configured vault_password_file in ansible.cfg, it will use that -- otherwise, it will prompt for the vault password upon usage.

Note: I don't think it will find vault encrypted strings as I rarely use them and didn't consider them while writing the script.

• Clone the repo or download the file.
• Copy or symlink the script to somewhere in your $PATH.
• It is also possible to place the script in the top level of the playbook and run it from there.

• Recursively search all vault files starting in your current working directory:

vaultsearch 'searchterm'

• For a shorter file path output use . as a location:

vaultsearch 'searchterm' .

• Recursively search all vault files starting from specified directory:

vaultsearch 'searchterm' host_vars/myhost

• Recursively search with regex patterns (I haven't tested many regex patterns yet):

vaultsearch 'searchterm|otherterm' group_vars/all

I had originally used a bash script which worked well, but took a long time when parsing the entire playbook.

Initial testing on a medium sized playbook shows this script can be up to 20x faster!:

# Bash Script
time vaultgrep 'user_001' .
<--snip-->
real    1m31.351s
user    1m21.560s
sys     0m8.327s

# Python Script
time vaultsearch 'user_001' .
<--snip-->
real    0m3.795s
user    0m3.743s
sys     0m0.044s

I do not have much experience with Python and pieced this together with snippets that I found from around the web.

Any pull requests improving the code and/or performance are welcomed.

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44142208/how-to-view-decrypt-ansible-vault-credentials-files-from-within-a-python-script
• https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/f8d2f0ac44f3e7a68277631bf4d464ed8b397832/lib/ansible/constants.py
• https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/f8d2f0ac44f3e7a68277631bf4d464ed8b397832/lib/ansible/parsing/vault/__init__.py
• https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/f8d2f0ac44f3e7a68277631bf4d464ed8b397832/lib/ansible/cli/__init__.py#L226
• https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/f8d2f0ac44f3e7a68277631bf4d464ed8b397832/lib/ansible/parsing/dataloader.py