Ansible can't connect to Vagrant VM (Permission denied)

Question

I've put together a VM using Vagrant (Virtualbox is the provider) for a server I'm setting up. I can SSH into the VM using vagrant ssh and ssh vmname, but when I run ansible-playbook -vvvv /path/to/playbook.yml, I get a "permission denied" error when Ansible tries to connect to the VM.

It's too long to post the results of running the playbook here, so I've uploaded it to Pastebin instead.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Did you have a ansible.cfg inside your current dir? Ansible could be using these configurations, made for another environment connection (different user, like the first answer here) and be impacting your directly connection. If so, try to hide your ansible.cfg file with:

mv ansible.cfg .ansible.cfg

Answer 2

Your playbook try connecting to the target vm with user root but that doesn't exist in the vm.

To double-check it, I think you get an error trying to login to the VM using

ssh root@vmname

Because you are sure that the vagrant user exists in the VM, setting remote_user as vagrant in /path/to/playbook.yml should solve your problem:

remote_user: vagrant

Otherwise, you can run ansible-playbook with options -u and -k

ansible-playbook /path/to/playbook.yml -u vagrant -k