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When I run ansible against a host machine that has some commands I need to run as root, I can't run these with "become" because it runs the commands as root instead of just running them with sudo.

What I've been doing is just using command: sudo ... and then suppressing warnings with 

args: 
  warn: no

is there a better, more standardized, way to run a linux commandline with sudo sans password?

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  • What is the real reason for this? Ansible use sudo under the hood when you execute task with become.
    – Konstantin Suvorov
    Dec 26, 2017 at 18:16
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    @kon when I use become I get "msg": "Missing sudo password" for a fail reason
    – Peter Turner ♦
    Dec 26, 2017 at 19:16

2 Answers 2

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When I run ansible against a host machine that has some commands I need to run as root, I can't run these with "become" because it runs the commands as root instead of just running them with sudo.

That's not true; become uses a variety of methods for privilege escalation, and defaults to using sudo.

Are you perhaps running into one of the known limitations with the become module, like trying to limit sudo access to certain commands?

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  • Well this seems like one of the limitations of ansible, when I run -vvv it's doing sudo -H -S -n -u root /bin/sh -c 'bunch of stuff'. I figured it could just run the command I want to with sudo privileges, but I guess that's a little naive since it needs to run 1000 other types of commands with root in a more general way.
    – Peter Turner ♦
    Dec 26, 2017 at 19:22
  • Came across this post and Ansible limitation as we are only allowed to run limited commands with sudo, don't have full sudo access to run any commands. Are there any alternatives other than running the command(s) as 'sudo /opt/apache/bin/apachectl start' either in Ansible shell or command module?
    – cnu
    Mar 11, 2021 at 21:01
  • @cnu You have three options: 1) Use the command module 2) Don't use sudo limitations in that way 3) Don't use ansible to trigger these commands.
    – Xiong Chiamiov
    Mar 15, 2021 at 19:14
  • @XiongChiamiov, Yes. Testing Ansible scripts with command module and that appears to be working fine other than producing "[WARNING]: Consider using 'become', 'become_method', and 'become_user' rather than running sudo".
    – cnu
    Mar 15, 2021 at 19:43
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Did you try -K already? I always use this option and then a sudo password has to be entered

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2
  • yeah, the problem is the ssh user I'm using doesn't have rights to start a shell as root, just to the commands I want to run via ansible.
    – Peter Turner ♦
    Dec 26, 2017 at 19:53
  • I do not think that it is possible to run commands as root if the user cannot start a shell as root as ansible is basically running commands via ssh.
    – 030
    Dec 26, 2017 at 21:30

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