How can I auth as different users without creating multiple hosts in Ansible?

Question

Specifically, I want to run most actions on host host as my personal chris user, but some commands as root. I think become: true wouldn't work well because chris needs a password to become root, and I don't want to have to enter this every time I deploy. My local public key is allowed to log into host as either chris or root (I've put my public key in both /root/.ssh/authorized_keys and /home/chris/.ssh/authorized_keys).

Is there a common way to tell ansible to perform some commands as another user by ssh'ing as that user, rather than by becoming that user via sudo? Or am I stuck creating two separate hosts in my hosts.yml, one with ansible_user: chris and one with ansible_user: root?

Answer 1

• ansible_user is a connection variable. See Controlling how Ansible behaves: precedence rules on how to declare or override the variable.

• See detail in Ansible connects with default remote_user ...

• Be aware that the best practice is to Disable Root Logins.