Watch: Enable user account - Ansible module user

Learn how to enable a user account on various operating systems using Ansible's user module with simple and effective code examples in this live Playbook.

How to Enable a user account with Ansible?

I'm going to show you a live Playbook with some simple Ansible code.

I'm Luca Berton and welcome to today's episode of Ansible Pilot.

Ansible enable user account

Today we're talking about the Ansible module user.

The full name is ansible.builtin.user, which means that is part of the collection of modules "builtin" with ansible and shipped with it.

It's a module pretty stable and out for years, it manages user accounts.

It supports a huge variety of Linux distributions, SunOS and macOS, and FreeBSD.

For Windows, use the ansible.windows.win_user module instead.

Parameters

name string - username

state string - present/absent

password_lock boolean - no/yes

shell string - "/bin/bash"

This module has many parameters to perform any task.

The only required is "name", which is the username.

The parameter "state" allows us to create or delete a user.

The "password_lock" parameter specifies to unlock the user password if locked.

This parameter uses the passwd tool to change a password by changing it to a value that matches no possible encrypted value (it adds a ´!´ at the beginning of the password). To enable our user obviously we need to disable this parameter.

The "shell" parameter specifies the user shell. Two very special are the nologin and false shell. Apply the value of "/bin/bash" is going to restore user access.

## Playbook

Let's jump into a real-life Ansible Playbook to enable a user without password lock and with the appropriate shell.

code

enable.yml

``yaml


---
name: user module Playbook
  hosts: all
  become: true
  vars:
    myuser: "example"
  tasks:
    - name: enable user
      ansible.builtin.user:
        name: "{{ myuser }}"
        state: present
        password_lock: false
        shell: "/bin/bash"



output

``bash

$ ansible-playbook -i Playbook/inventory enable\ user\ account/user.yml

PLAY [user module Playbook] *

TASK [Gathering Facts]

ok: [demo.example.com]

TASK [enable user]

changed: [demo.example.com]

PLAY RECAP **

demo.example.com : ok=2 changed=1 unreachable=0 failed=0 skipped=0 rescued=0 ignored=0