Ansible: best practice for maintaining list of sudoers

Question

In the documentation, there is an example of using the lineinfile module to edit /etc/sudoers.

- lineinfile: "dest=/etc/sudoers state=present regexp='^%wheel' line='%wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL'"

Feels a bit hackish.

I assumed there would be something in the user module to handle this but there doesn't appear to be any options.

What are the best practices for adding and removing users to /etc/sudoers?

Answer 1

That line isn't actually adding an users to sudoers, merely making sure that the wheel group can have passwordless sudo for all command.

As for adding users to /etc/sudoers this is best done by adding users to necessary groups and then giving these groups the relevant access to sudo. This holds true when you aren't using Ansible too.

The user module allows you to specify an exclusive list of group or to simply append the specified groups to the current ones that the user already has. This is naturally idempotent as a user cannot be defined to be in a group multiple times.

An example play might look something like this:

- hosts: all
  vars:
    sudoers:
      - user1
      - user2
      - user3
  tasks:
    - name: Make sure we have a 'wheel' group
      group:
        name: wheel
        state: present

    - name: Allow 'wheel' group to have passwordless sudo
      lineinfile:
        dest: /etc/sudoers
        state: present
        regexp: '^%wheel'
        line: '%wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL'
        validate: visudo -cf %s

    - name: Add sudoers users to wheel group
      user:
        name: "{{ item }}"
        groups: wheel
        append: yes
      with_items: "{{ sudoers }}"