Ansible Journey 4: Running Elevated Ansible Commands

For ansible to be useful, it will require the ability to execute commands as the root user (or equivalent). This page addresses how to given a dedicated ansible user (andadm) the ability to execute commands using the system’s sudo facility. (Other elevated privilege mechanisms are available, however sudo is the default and is perfectly capable of meeting our needs.)

Ansible requires two additional items to be added to the command-line. The first, --become, tells ansible to attempt to obtain elevated privileges. The second, --ask-become-pass instructs Ansible to ask you for the password before attempting the connection. Here is a command that will install Nginx to all systems in the inventory:

[ansadm@rocky-1 ansible]$ ansible all -m dnf -a 'name=nginx state=present' --become --ask-become-pass

BECOME password:                      <== ansadm's password here.

192.168.5.250 | CHANGED => {

   "ansible_facts": {

     "discovered_interpreter_python": "/usr/libexec/platform-python"

   },

   "changed": true,

   "msg": "",

   "rc": 0,

   "results": [

     "Installed: nginx-mod-http-perl-1:1.14.1-9.module+el8.4.0+542+81547229.x86_64",

[...]

     "Installed: nginx-mod-http-xslt-filter-1:1.14.1-9.module+el8.4.0+542+81547229.x86_64"

   ]

}

You can also use the single-character parameters, -b to replace ‘--become’ and -K to replace ‘--ask-become-pass.’

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