How do you apply become for privilege escalation in Ansible?

become tells Ansible to execute a task (or an entire play) as a different user, typically root, using a privilege escalation method like sudo, rather than requiring the SSH connection itself to log in as that user.

- name: Install a system package
  hosts: webservers
  become: true
  become_user: root
  become_method: sudo
  tasks:
    - name: Install nginx
      ansible.builtin.package:
        name: nginx
        state: present

become can be set at the play level (applying to every task), at an individual task level (for one-off privilege changes), or globally via ansible.cfg. By default it escalates to root, but become_user can target any account, and become_method supports alternatives like su or platform-specific mechanisms beyond sudo. This lets a playbook connect over SSH as a low-privilege deployment user while still performing root-level system changes only where explicitly needed.

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