How to get an arbitrary remote user's home directory in Ansible?

Question

I can do that with shell using combination of getent and awk like this:

getent passwd $user | awk -F: '{ print $6 }' 

For the reference, in Puppet I can use a custom fact, like this:

require 'etc'  Etc.passwd { |user|     Facter.add("home_#{user.name}") do       setcode do          user.dir       end    end  } 

which makes the user's home directory available as a home_<user name> fact.

How do I get the home directory of an arbitrary remote user?

Answer 1

Ansible (from 1.4 onwards) already reveals environment variables for the user under the ansible_env variable.

- hosts: all   tasks:     - name: debug through ansible.env       debug: var=ansible_env.HOME 

Unfortunately you can apparently only use this to get environment variables for the connected user as this playbook and output shows:

- hosts: all   tasks:     - name: debug specified user's home dir through ansible.env       debug: var=ansible_env.HOME       become: true       become_user: "{{ user }}"      - name: debug specified user's home dir through lookup on env       debug: var=lookup('env','HOME')       become: true       become_user: "{{ user }}" 

OUTPUT:

vagrant@Test-01:~$ ansible-playbook -i "inventory/vagrant" env_vars.yml -e "user=testuser"  PLAY [all] ********************************************************************  GATHERING FACTS *************************************************************** ok: [192.168.0.30]  TASK: [debug specified user's home dir through ansible.env] ******************* ok: [192.168.0.30] => {     "var": {         "/home/vagrant": "/home/vagrant"     } }  TASK: [debug specified user's home dir through lookup on env] ***************** ok: [192.168.0.30] => {     "var": {         "/home/vagrant": "/home/vagrant"     } }  PLAY RECAP ******************************************************************** 192.168.0.30               : ok=3    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0 

As with anything in Ansible, if you can't get a module to give you what you want then you are always free to shell out (although this should be used sparingly as it may be fragile and will be less descriptive) using something like this:

- hosts: all   tasks:     - name: get user home directory       shell: >              getent passwd {{ user }}  | awk -F: '{ print $6 }'       changed_when: false       register: user_home      - name: debug output       debug:         var: user_home.stdout 

There may well be a cleaner way of doing this and I'm a little surprised that using become_user to switch to the user specified doesn't seem to affect the env lookup but this should give you what you want.

Answer 2

I think there are several answers given here that would work, but I thought I'd show that you can get this from the ansible user module, by registering it as a variable.

- user:     name: www-data     state: present   register: webserver_user_registered 

Note: it will create the user if it doesn't exist...

So we can use debug to show the values of that var, including the path...

- debug:     var: webserver_user_registered  TASK [wordpress : debug] ****************** ok: [wordpresssite.org] => {     "webserver_user_registered": {         "append": false,         "changed": false,         "comment": "www-data",         "failed": false,         "group": 33,         "home": "/var/www",      <<------ this is the user home dir         "move_home": false,         "name": "www-data",         "shell": "/usr/sbin/nologin",         "state": "present",         "uid": 33     } } 

And you can use those properties in other modules like this;

- file:     name: "{{ webserver_user_registered.home }}/.wp-cli"     state: directory