Trick for getting remote user info in Ansible

remote-user-info.yml

---

# Ansible doesn't expose the shell environment of the remotely logged in user
# so we need to use a few tricks to get some of these values.
#
# This playbook demonstrates how to get a couple of useful environment variables.
#
# NOTE: these values are different to ansible_env.ansible_user_dir and
#       ansible_env.ansible_user_shell which represent the user running ansible.

- hosts: all 
  vars:
    app_user: foobar
        
  tasks:
    - name: Get the user's home directory
      shell: >
        egrep "^{{ app_user }}:" /etc/passwd | awk -F: '{ print $6 }'
      changed_when: false
      register: user_home
        
    - name: Get the user's shell
      shell: >
        egrep "^{{ app_user }}:" /etc/passwd | awk -F: '{ print $7 }' | awk -F/ '{print $3}' 
      changed_when: false
      register: user_shell
      
    - debug: msg="info for user {{ app_user }} - HOME={{ user_home.stdout }}, SHELL={{ user_shell.stdout }}"
    
    # To access the user's environment variables we invoke their shell in interactive mode which presumably
    # will run load .profile and/or .login
    - name: Get the user's language
      command: "{{ user_shell.stdout }} -ic 'echo $LANG'"
      changed_when: false
      register: user_lang

    - debug: msg="language for user {{ app_user }} is {{ user_lang.stdout }}"