How to run an ansible-playbook with a passphrase-protected-ssh-private-key?

Question

I have an autoscaling group on Amazon EC2 and I have added my public key when I create AMI with packer so I can run ansible-playbook and ssh to the hos

Answer 1

In ansible There is no option to store passphrase-protected private key

For that we need to add the passphrase-protected private key in the ssh-agent

Start the ssh-agent in the background.

# eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"

Add SSH private key to the ssh-agent

# ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Now try running ansible-playbook and ssh to the hosts.

Answer 2

I solved it by running ssh-add once and use it like if it's not password protected.

Answer 3

Building up on @javeed-shakeel's answer, I added the following lines to my .bashrc:

command -v ansible > /dev/null &&
    alias ansible='ssh-add -l > /dev/null || ssh-add 2> /dev/null && ansible'
command -v ansible-playbook > /dev/null &&
    alias ansible-playbook='ssh-add -l > /dev/null || ssh-add 2> /dev/null && ansible-playbook'

This will run ssh-add before ansible(-playbook) iff there was no key added to the ssh-agent, yet. This has the advantage that one does not need to run ssh-add by hand and one will be asked for the passphrase only if it is necessary.