"Unable to open shell" when not running playbook as sudo

[Bryan Bartik]

I have a playbook that backups router configs using the ios_config module. When I run the command as sudo it works but the files it creates are owned by root. I want them owned by me. However when I run the ansible-playbook command without sudo it fails and gives the errors below. Any ideas what I need to change to get this to work?

bryan@ubuntu:~/mine/cfg-backup$ ansible-playbook -vvv cfg-backup.yml

...

<192.168.9.201> using connection plugin network_cli

<192.168.9.202> using connection plugin network_cli

<192.168.9.203> using connection plugin network_cli

fatal: [192.168.9.202]: FAILED! => {

    "changed": false,

    "msg": "unable to open shell. Please see: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/network_debug_troubleshooting.html#unable-to-open-shell"

}

fatal: [192.168.9.201]: FAILED! => {

    "changed": false,

    "msg": "unable to open shell. Please see: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/network_debug_troubleshooting.html#unable-to-open-shell"

}

fatal: [192.168.9.203]: FAILED! => {

    "changed": false,

    "msg": "unable to open shell. Please see: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/network_debug_troubleshooting.html#unable-to-open-shell"

}

Thanks,

Bryan

[Bryan Bartik]

I think I figured it out. There are directories in ~/.ansible that were owned by root that need to be writeable by the user running ansible. They were owned by root probably because I ran the playbook as sudo the first time. I chowned these and now everything is fine.