How to switch a user per task or set of tasks?

Question

A recurring theme that\'s in my ansible playbooks is that I often must execute a command with sudo privileges (sudo: yes) because I\'d like to do it for a certa

Answer 1

In Ansible >1.4 you can actually specify a remote user at the task level which should allow you to login as that user and execute that command without resorting to sudo. If you can't login as that user then the sudo_user solution will work too.

---
- hosts: webservers
  remote_user: root
  tasks:
    - name: test connection
      ping:
      remote_user: yourname

See http://docs.ansible.com/playbooks_intro.html#hosts-and-users