Ansible: create a user with sudo privileges

Sometimes it's knowing what to ask. I didn't know as I am a developer who has taken on some DevOps work.

Apparently 'passwordless' or NOPASSWD login is a thing which you need to put in the /etc/sudoers file.

The answer to my question is at Ansible: best practice for maintaining list of sudoers.

The Ansible playbook code fragment looks like this from my problem:

- name: Make sure we have a 'wheel' group
  group:
    name: wheel
    state: present

- name: Allow 'wheel' group to have passwordless sudo
  lineinfile:
    dest: /etc/sudoers
    state: present
    regexp: '^%wheel'
    line: '%wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL'
    validate: 'visudo -cf %s'

- name: Add sudoers users to wheel group
  user:
    name=deployer
    groups=wheel
    append=yes
    state=present
    createhome=yes

- name: Set up authorized keys for the deployer user
  authorized_key: user=deployer key="{{item}}"
  with_file:
    - /home/railsdev/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

And the best part is that the solution is idempotent. It doesn't add the line

%wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

to /etc/sudoers when the playbook is run a subsequent time. And yes...I was able to ssh into the server as "deployer" and run sudo commands without having to give a password.

To create a user with sudo privileges is to put the user into /etc/sudoers, or make the user a member of a group specified in /etc/sudoers. And to make it password-less is to additionally specify NOPASSWD in /etc/sudoers.

Example of /etc/sudoers:

## Allow root to run any commands anywhere
root    ALL=(ALL)       ALL

## Allows people in group wheel to run all commands
%wheel  ALL=(ALL)       ALL

## Same thing without a password
%wheel  ALL=(ALL)       NOPASSWD: ALL

And instead of fiddling with /etc/sudoers file, we can create a new file in /etc/sudoers.d/ directory since this directory is included by /etc/sudoers by default, which avoids the possibility of breaking existing sudoers file, and also eliminates the dependency on the content inside of /etc/sudoers.

To achieve above in Ansible, refer to the following:

- name: sudo without password for wheel group
  copy:
    content: '%wheel ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL'
    dest: /etc/sudoers.d/wheel_nopasswd
    mode: 0440

You may replace %wheel with other group names like %sudoers or other user names like deployer.