# Trouble with vault multi line password files

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/trouble-with-vault-multi-line-password-files/34318>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Tags:** ubuntu\
**Created:** [December 10, 2020, 9:48pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/trouble-with-vault-multi-line-password-files/34318 "2020-12-10T21:48:18Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Jorgen-P](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ce7236/32.png) [@Jorgen-P](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Jorgen-P)\
**Post date:** [December 10, 2020, 9:48pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/trouble-with-vault-multi-line-password-files/34318/1 "2020-12-10T21:48:18Z")

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Greetings

I have tried to get Ansible vault to use a multi line password file as described in  
[https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user\_guide/vault.html#storing-vault-passwords](https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/vault.html#storing-vault-passwords)  
I can not get this to work. I have tried different combinations of the vault-id, vault-password-file, and encrypt-vault-id parameters and it seems like vault uses the entire file for its password rather than a specific line matching the vault id.  
For example: create a file f containing some plaintext and a file p with the 2 lines:  
v pass  
v2 pass2

This works:  
ansible-vault encrypt --vault-id v@p f  
And this also works:  
ansible-vault edit --vault-id v@p f  
But then if I change the contents of p, say I remove the second line, then I instead get this error: “ERROR! Decryption failed (no vault secrets were found that could decrypt) for /tmp/tmp.CmrXnTscYP/f”

Ansible is installed from pip on Ubuntu 20.04  
ansible 2.10.3  
python version = 3.8.5 (default, Jul 28 2020, 12:59:40) [GCC 9.3.0]

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**Author:** ![sivel](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/ansible/user_avatar/forum.ansible.com/sivel/32/1198_2.png) [@sivel](https://forum.ansible.com/u/sivel)\
**Post date:** [December 10, 2020, 10:19pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/trouble-with-vault-multi-line-password-files/34318/2 "2020-12-10T22:19:49Z")

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That documentation is completely bogus. That format doesn’t exist.

What is happening is that the _entire_ contents of the file is being used as the password.

A vault password file can only contain exactly 1 password and nothing else.

There is an open issue for this: [https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/72230](https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/72230)

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Jorgen-P](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ce7236/32.png) [@Jorgen-P](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Jorgen-P)\
**Post date:** [December 10, 2020, 11:41pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/trouble-with-vault-multi-line-password-files/34318/3 "2020-12-10T23:41:12Z")

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How annoying that it made it in there. Thank you for the info and link.

torsdag 10 december 2020 kl. 23:20:46 UTC+1 skrev Matt Martz: