Ansible: best practice for maintaining list of sudoers

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 }}"

I prefer to use /etc/sudoers.d/ for this if possible (this is less risky, more modular and self-decriptive), so this approach looks like:

$ cat files/*%admins ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL$ cat tasks/*- name: sudoers | Create sudoers.d files  copy:    src: ./    dest: /etc/sudoers.d    owner: root    group: root    mode: ug+rwX,o=    force: yes

File are pre-checked with visudo -cf file_name.