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About Luca Berton
Luca Berton is an Ansible automation expert, author of "Ansible for VMware by Examples" and "Ansible for Kubernetes by Example" published by Apress, and creator of the Ansible Pilot YouTube channel. He shares practical automation knowledge through tutorials, books, and video courses to help IT professionals and DevOps engineers master infrastructure automation.
Ansible Remove Windows User: win_user Module state=absent (Examples) — Video Tutorial
How to remove local Windows user accounts with Ansible win_user module. Delete users, remove profiles, and manage Windows accounts across multiple servers.
What You'll Learn
- How to Remove a local user on Windows-like systems with Ansible?
- Ansible remove local user account
- Parameters
- code
- execution
- idempotency
- before execution
- after execution
- Conclusion
- Remove Windows User Examples
Full Tutorial Content
How to Remove a local user on Windows-like systems with Ansible?
I'm going to show you a live Playbook with some simple Ansible code.
I'm Luca Berton and welcome to today's episode of Ansible Pilot.
Ansible remove local user account
- `ansible.windows.win_user`
- Manages local Windows user accounts
Today we're talking about Ansible module `win_user`.
The full name is `ansible.windows.win_user`, which means that is part of the collection of modules specialized to interact with Windows target host.
It's a module pretty stable and out for years.
It works in Windows and Windows Server operating systems.
It manages local Windows user accounts.
For Linux target use the `user` module instead.
Parameters
- name _string_ - user name
- state _string_ - present/absent
The only required is "name", which is the user name.
The "state" parameter allows us to create or delete a user. For our use case, we need to use the "absent" option.
## Playbook
How to Remove a local user on Windows-like systems with Ansible Playbook.
I'm going to show you how to automate the deletion of the "example" user on my Playbook Windows machine.
code
```yaml
---
- name: windows user remove
hosts: all
vars:
usr_name: 'example'
tasks:
- name: delete local user
ansible.windows.win_user:
name: "{{ usr_name }}"
state: absent
```
execution
```bash
ansible-pilot $ ansible-playbook -i virtualmachines/win/inventory windows/user_remove.yml
PLAY [windows user remove] ************************************************************************
TASK [Gathering Facts] ****************************************************************************
ok: [WindowsServer]
TASK [delete local user] **************************************************************************
changed: [WindowsServer]
PLAY RECAP ****************************************************************************************
WindowsServer : ok=2 changed=1 unreachable=0 failed=0 skipped=0 rescued=0 ignored=0
ansible-pilot $
```
idempotency
```bash
ansible-pilot $ ansible-playbook -i virtualmachines/win/inventory windows/user_remove.yml
PLAY [windows user remove] ************************************************************************
TASK [Gathering Facts] ****************************************************************************
ok: [WindowsServer]
TASK [delete local user] **************************************************************************
ok: [WindowsServer]
PLAY RECAP ****************************************************************************************
WindowsServer : ok=2 changed=0 unreachable=0 failed=0 skipped=0 rescued=0 ignored=0
ansible-pilot $
```
before execution

after execution

[code with ❤️ in GitHub](https://github.com/lucab85/ansible-pilot/)
Conclu
About This Tutorial
- Author: Luca Berton
- Difficulty: Beginner
- Read time: 4 min
- Category: troubleshooting
Read the full written article: Ansible Remove Windows User: win_user Module state=absent (Examples)
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