Copy the ssl certificate from a server to a host in ansible

Question

I'm trying to copy the Certificate of a local Container registry to a Docker host with ansible version 2.9.6. The registry is managed by someone else but within our local network.

With the shell I would do it in this way:

openssl s_client -showcerts -connect registry.example:443 < /dev/null 2> /dev/null | openssl x509 -outform PEM > ca.crt

So far I worked my way around the community.crypto module for ansible ans managed to get the certificate with:

- name: get certificate from registry
  community.crypto.get_certificate:
    host: "{{ registry_url }}"
    port: "{{ registry_port }}"
  delegate_to: localhost
  become: no
  register: cert

This behaves like the first half of the shell alternative. What I still haven't figured out is how to do the job of the second half, which would be creating the certificate with the content received from the server.

I tried using community.crypto.x509_certificate but I can not make it behave like the openssl_client would in the following shell example.

openssl x509 -outform PEM -in server_content_file -text -out ca.crt

Is there a way to do this with the community.crypto module or in any other way using ansible?

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 19 '21 at 12:29

One option you haven't pursued is just running the openssl commands in Ansible. The following example assumes you've set the remotehost variable to e.g. registry.example:

- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: false
  tasks:
    - name: get remote certificate
      command: openssl s_client -showcerts -connect {{ remotehost }}
      register: remotecert

    - name: extract certificate
      command: openssl x509 -outform PEM
      args:
        stdin: "{{ remotecert.stdout }}"
      register: remotex509

    - name: write ca.crt
      copy:
        dest: ./ca.crt
        content: "{{ remotex509.stdout }}"

And while somewhat less granular, you can of course combine everything into a single shell script:

- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: false
  tasks:
    - name: get remote certificate
      shell: >-
        openssl s_client -showcerts -connect {{ remotehost }} |
        openssl x509 -outform PEM > ca.crt
      args:
        creates: ca.crt
      register: remotecert

The creates args will cause the task to be skipped if the target file (ca.crt) already exists.

Thank you for your answer. This works like a charm. I guess I was too focused on using the crypto module. — sve_wo, Jul 20 '21 at 07:03

Copy the ssl certificate from a server to a host in ansible

1 Answers1