I can do that with shell using combination of getent
and awk
like this:
getent passwd $user | awk -F: '{ print $6 }'
For the reference, in Puppet I can use a custom fact, like this:
require 'etc'
Etc.passwd { |user|
Facter.add("home_#{user.name}") do
setcode do
user.dir
end
end
}
which makes the user's home directory available as a home_<user name>
fact.
How do I get the home directory of an arbitrary remote user?
Ansible (from 1.4 onwards) already reveals environment variables for the user under the ansible_env
variable.
- hosts: all
tasks:
- name: debug through ansible.env
debug: var=ansible_env.HOME
Unfortunately you can apparently only use this to get environment variables for the connected user as this playbook and output shows:
- hosts: all
tasks:
- name: debug specified user's home dir through ansible.env
debug: var=ansible_env.HOME
become: true
become_user: "{{ user }}"
- name: debug specified user's home dir through lookup on env
debug: var=lookup('env','HOME')
become: true
become_user: "{{ user }}"
OUTPUT:
vagrant@Test-01:~$ 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.