Become Plugins

• Enabling Become Plugins
• Using Become Plugins
• Plugin List

Become plugins work to ensure that Ansible can use certain privilege escalation systems when running the basic commands to work with the target machine as well as the modules required to execute the tasks specified in the play.

These utilities (sudo, su, doas, etc) generally let you ‘become’ another user to execute a command with the permissions of that user.

Enabling Become Plugins

The become plugins shipped with Ansible are already enabled. Custom plugins can be added by placing them into a become_plugins directory adjacent to your play, inside a role, or by placing them in one of the become plugin directory sources configured in ansible.cfg.

Using Become Plugins

In addition to the default configuration settings in Ansible Configuration Settings or the --become-method command line option, you can use the become_method keyword in a play or, if you need to be ‘host specific’, the connection variable ansible_become_method to select the plugin to use.

You can further control the settings for each plugin via other configuration options detailed in the plugin themselves (linked below).

Plugin List

You can use ansible-doc -t become -l to see the list of available plugins. Use ansible-doc -t become <plugin name> to see specific documentation and examples.

• doas – Do As user
• dzdo – Centrify’s Direct Authorize
• enable – Switch to elevated permissions on a network device
• ksu – Kerberos substitute user
• machinectl – Systemd’s machinectl privilege escalation
• pbrun – PowerBroker run
• pfexec – profile based execution
• pmrun – Privilege Manager run
• runas – Run As user
• sesu – CA Privileged Access Manager
• su – Substitute User
• sudo – Substitute User DO