Ansible ask for vault password for a host that don't need any variable

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1

Hi,

i’m a pretty satisfied Ansible user but

i got an issue maybe caused by a bad practice or a bad definition on my Inventory.

I have two inventories( production/ development) in /etc/ansible/invenories with several hosts defined like these:

example1 ansible_ssh_host=10.0.8.142
example2 ansible_ssh_host=10.0.8.143

example3 ansible_ssh_host=10.0.8.144

[group1]
example1
example2
example3

and some variables for each hosts encrypted by Ansible-vault:

(i.e) host_vars/example1.yml , host_vars/example2.yml and i don’t have any vars on example3

`
2

If ansible is asked to open a vault file it will always try, if it
does not have a password it will fail. There is no way to know if a
variable inside the file is used unless you open it and examine it, so
we enter the paradox of needing to open the file to find out if we
need to open it.

If you know your play won't need those vault files, you should avoid
referencing them directly or indirectly to avoid needing a password.