Missing become password when sudoing

Question

I'm seeing an error message when I try to run a task with sudo in my Ansible playbook.

Here's my playbook:

---
- hosts: production
  gather_facts: no
  remote_user: deployer
  become: yes
  become_method: sudo
  become_user: root

  tasks:
    - name: Whoami
      command: /usr/bin/whoami

I would expect whoami to be root but the task fails with the error message:

» ansible-playbook -i ansible_hosts sudo.yml --ask-sudo-pass
SUDO password: [I paste my sudo password here]

PLAY [production] *************************************************************

GATHERING FACTS ***************************************************************
fatal: [MY.IP] => Missing become password

TASK: [Whoami] ****************************************************************
FATAL: no hosts matched or all hosts have already failed -- aborting

When I manually ssh into the box and try to sudo it works as expected:

» ssh deployer@production
» sudo whoami
[I paste the same sudo password]
root

The deployer user password was set by Ansible as follows (in a different playbook):

- hosts: production
  remote_user: root

  # The {{ansible_become_pass}} comes from this file:
  vars_files:
    - ./config.yml

  tasks:

    - name: Create deployer user
      user: name=deployer uid=1040 groups=sudo,deployer shell=/bin/bash password={{ansible_become_pass}}

Where {{ansible_become_pass}} is the password I desire hashed with the following python snippet:

python -c 'import crypt; print crypt.crypt("password I desire", "$1$SomeSalt$")'

"password I desire" is replace with a password and "$1$SomeSalt$" is a random salt.

I'm using Ansible version 1.9.4.

What's the problem?

Answer 1

I have tried your version, and playbook, only with --ask-pass, which returns "stdout": "root" result.

You have to replace --ask-sudo-pass with --ask-pass. And make sure, your deployer user has root privileges.

$ ./bin/ansible --version
ansible 1.9.4
$ ./ansible/bin/ansible-playbook -vv pl.yml --ask-pass 
SSH password: 

PLAY [localhost] ************************************************************** 

TASK: [Whoami] **************************************************************** 
<localhost> REMOTE_MODULE command /usr/bin/whoami
changed: [localhost] => {"changed": true, "cmd": ["/usr/bin/whoami"], "delta": "0:00:00.002555", "end": "2015-12-05 07:17:16.634485", "rc": 0, "start": "2015-12-05 07:17:16.631930", "stderr": "", "stdout": "root", "warnings": []}

PLAY RECAP ******************************************************************** 
localhost                  : ok=1    changed=1    unreachable=0    failed=0