ansible-vault

ansible-vault is a skill for Claude Code from vinnie357/claude-skills. It costs 46 tokens per session (1,564 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to Ansible Vault, the part of Ansible used to encrypt passwords, API keys, certificates, and other secrets. It explains vault passwords, vault IDs, and secret backends.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when encrypting secret files or variables, managing vault passwords, and applying safer secret-handling practices.
Why use it?
It helps keep sensitive values out of plain text while still allowing Ansible to use them during automation.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the ansible plugin — 5 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it when encrypting secret files or variables, managing vault passwords, and applying safer secret-handling practices.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/ansible-vault
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add vinnie357/claude-skills --skill ansible-vault
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vinnie357/claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install ansible, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 5 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for ansible-vault

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/ansible-vault/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/ansible-vault)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/ansible-vault"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/ansible-vault/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for ansible-vault

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/ansible-vault"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/ansible-vault.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 46 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,564 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 8 findings, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Privilege Escalation · line 31
    Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.
    Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
  • high Privilege Escalation · line 40
    Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.
    Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
  • high Privilege Escalation · line 43
    Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.
    Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
  • high Privilege Escalation · line 46
    Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.
    Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
  • high Privilege Escalation · line 34
    Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.
    Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
  • high Privilege Escalation · line 37
    Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.
    Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
  • medium Privilege Escalation · line 103
    Commands invoke sudo or root privileges. Verify this elevated access is necessary and justified.
    Fix: Avoid sudo/root unless strictly required. Prefer least-privilege patterns. If elevation is needed, document the justification and scope.
  • medium Privilege Escalation · line 173
    Commands invoke sudo or root privileges. Verify this elevated access is necessary and justified.
    Fix: Avoid sudo/root unless strictly required. Prefer least-privilege patterns. If elevation is needed, document the justification and scope.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00046 $0.01564
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00782
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00313
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00156

Measured 8d ago against content hash fdb58cf98cf0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ansible-vault scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Asks for rootlowPrivilege escalation

A mod that escalates privileges can change anything on the machine, not only the project.

The password file should contain only the password string with no trailing newline. Protect it with `chmod 600`.

Downgraded: this mod is about security review, or the phrase is quoted, so it is likely naming the pattern rather than instructing it.

plugins/tools/ansible/skills/ansible-vault/SKILL.md · 209 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 209 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Ansible Vault

Activate when encrypting secrets, managing vault passwords, configuring vault IDs, or applying security hardening to Ansible playbooks and variable files.

Anti-fabrication

This skill follows core:anti-fabrication. The ansible-vault CLI commands are stable core-Ansible surface, low risk. The real claim area is references/secret-backends.md's HashiCorp Vault lookup plugin options (url, token, auth_method, role_id, secret_id, return_format). Verified against community.hashi_vault 7.1.0 (ansible-galaxy-installed live, claude-skills-223) via ansible-doc -t lookup -j: those option names and the auth_method choices (token/userpass/ldap/approle/aws_iam/azure/ jwt/cert/gcp/none) all exist as documented. Re-verify against a current ansible-doc community.hashi_vault.hashi_vault before asserting an option this skill doesn't cover — the collection version-pins independently of ansible-core.

Why Vault Exists

Secrets (passwords, API keys, certificates) must never be committed to version control in plaintext. Ansible Vault encrypts secrets at rest using AES-256 so they can be safely committed to git while remaining usable by Ansible at runtime.

ansible-vault CLI Commands

# Create a new encrypted file
ansible-vault create secrets.yml

# Encrypt an existing file
ansible-vault encrypt vars/db_password.yml

# Decrypt a file to plaintext (use with caution)
ansible-vault decrypt vars/db_password.yml

# View encrypted content without decrypting the file
ansible-vault view vars/secrets.yml

# Edit an encrypted file (opens $EDITOR)
ansible-vault edit vars/secrets.yml

# Change the vault password on an encrypted file
ansible-vault rekey vars/secrets.yml

# Encrypt a single string value (paste the output inline in YAML)
ansible-vault encrypt_string 'my-secret-value' --name 'db_password'

Encrypting Individual Variables

Use encrypt_string to encrypt a single value and embed it inline in an otherwise plain YAML file:

ansible-vault encrypt_string 'super_secret_pw' --name 'db_password'

Read the full file on GitHub · 209 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 8d ago First seen · 209 lines · 46 tokens per session scan A fdb58cf98cf0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ansible-vault is a skill published in the GitHub repository vinnie357/claude-skills (25 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 46 tokens to every session and 1,564 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (asks for root). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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