Why does ansible-navigator hang when it asks for a vault password, and how do you fix it?

By default ansible-navigator records a "playbook artifact" (a JSON log of the run), and with artifacts enabled it cannot take an interactive vault password; it just waits. Disable artifacts with --pae false (--playbook-artifact-enable false) or in ansible-navigator.yml.

$ ansible-navigator run -m stdout --pae false site.yml --vault-id @prompt
Vault password (default): ****

To make it permanent, set it in the project's ansible-navigator.yml (or ~/.ansible-navigator.yml):

ansible-navigator:
  playbook-artifact:
    enable: false

Some background: ansible-navigator is Red Hat's newer front end for running playbooks. It runs them inside an execution environment (a container image with Ansible and its dependencies) and by default saves each run as an artifact file you can replay later. ansible-playbook has none of that, which is why it can simply prompt with --ask-vault-pass.

Go deeper:

• ansible-navigator settings (official docs) — playbook-artifact.enable and the matching CLI flag.