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Create and manage users with Ansible – automatically create sudo users

Creating users is a very trivial task that requires time, especially if there is not a Active Directory mechanism integrated with the Linux servers. In order to make your life easier as an administrator you can run the below playbook that will create users based on a list and add them sudo capabilities.

Task 1
creates the users that have been specified on the loop section.

Task 2
creates the appropriate sudoers file

  1 ---               
  2 - name: create sudoers users based on request
  3   hosts: localhost
  4   become: true    
  5   tasks:          
  6     - name: create users based on a list
  7       user:       
  8         name: "{{ item }}"
  9         password: "{{ '#Passw0rd#' | password_hash('sha512') }}"
 10         shell: /bin/bash
 11       loop:       
 12         - user1
 13         - user2
 14                   
 15     - name: create sudoers file for user
 16       copy:       
 17         content: '{{ item }} ALL = (ALL) ALL'
 18         dest: "/etc/sudoers.d/{{item}}"
 19       loop:       
 20         - user1
 21         - user2

Run the playbook and verify that the password is correct and user has sudo capabilities.

ansible-playbook createusers.yml

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Elevate sudo privileges through winSCP for sudoers

If a Linux user has sudo privileges ( for example with a sudoers file) they can be elevated to root through winscp with the below procedure:

Create an entry on your sudoers.d directory and allow user to execute sudo commands without password.

Select advanced settings on winscp (scp connection)

on shell tab select the one shown below

By doing the above you will login as root (elevated privileges on your specific user – myuser in my case)