Ansible privilege escalation

Ansible provides privilege escalation options to run commands with elevated privileges on target hosts. These options include:

• --ask-become-pass or -K: Asks for the privilege escalation password.
• --become-method: Specifies the privilege escalation method to use, such as sudo (default) or others listed in ansible-doc -t become -l.
• --become-user: Runs operations as the specified user (default is root). This option is useful when you want to execute commands as a different user.
• -b or --become: Runs operations with privilege escalation (does not imply password prompting).

Here are some examples:

Running a command without privilege escalation:

$ ansible -i inventory/hosts -m shell -a 'whoami' blacktemple

Running a command with privilege escalation (as root):

$ ansible -i inventory/hosts -b --ask-become-pass -m shell -a 'whoami' blacktemple

Running a command with privilege escalation using a sudoer without password prompt:

$ ansible -i inventory/hosts -b -m shell -a 'whoami' blacktemple

Running a command with privilege escalation as user “nginx”:

$ ansible -i inventory/hosts -b --become-user nginx -m shell -a 'whoami' blacktemple