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I'm trying to create a user on a number of hosts via Ansible. To do so I created the following task using the user module and the password_hash filter: - name: Create user ansible.built...
#1: Initial revision
by
GeraldS
·
2026-03-20T11:02:15Z (6 months ago)
Using the `password_hash` filter with an encrypted variable in Ansible
I'm trying to create a user on a number of hosts via Ansible. To do so I created the following task using the [`user` module](https://docs.ansible.com/projects/ansible/latest/collections/ansible/builtin/user_module.html) and the [`password_hash` filter](https://docs.ansible.com/projects/ansible/latest/collections/ansible/builtin/password_hash_filter.html):
```yaml
- name: Create user
ansible.builtin.user:
name: username
comment: "Some User"
password: "{{ user_password | password_hash('sha512', 'salt') }}"
update_password: always
group: username
state: present
shell: /bin/bash
```
This works fine as long as I have `user_password` defined as clear text in the corresponding variable file. But as soon as I store the password encrypted with [Ansible vault](https://docs.ansible.com/projects/ansible/latest/vault_guide/index.html) I get the following error when I try to run the playbook:
> fatal: [hostname]: FAILED! => {"msg": "Unexpected templating type error occurred on ({{ user_password | password_hash('sha512', 'salt') }}): secret must be unicode or bytes, not ansible.parsing.yaml.objects.AnsibleVaultEncryptedUnicode. secret must be unicode or bytes, not ansible.parsing.yaml.objects.AnsibleVaultEncryptedUnicode"}