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Ansible Ignores ansible.cfg on WSL2 Windows Mounts

Problem

Running Ansible from a repo on a Windows drive (/mnt/c/, /mnt/d/, etc.) in WSL2 silently ignores the local ansible.cfg. You'll see:

[WARNING]: Ansible is being run in a world writable directory
(/mnt/d/MajorAnsible), ignoring it as an ansible.cfg source.

This causes vault decryption to fail (Attempting to decrypt but no vault secrets found), inventory to fall back to /etc/ansible/hosts, and remote_user to reset to defaults — even though ansible.cfg is right there in the project directory.

Cause

WSL2 mounts Windows NTFS drives with broad permissions (typically 0777). Ansible refuses to load ansible.cfg from any world-writable directory as a security measure — a malicious user on a shared system could inject a rogue config.

This is hardcoded behavior in Ansible and cannot be overridden with a flag.

Solutions

Export the settings that ansible.cfg would normally provide. Add to ~/.bashrc:

export ANSIBLE_VAULT_PASSWORD_FILE=~/.ansible/vault_pass

Other common settings you may need:

export ANSIBLE_REMOTE_USER=root
export ANSIBLE_INVENTORY=/mnt/d/MajorAnsible/inventory/inventory.yml

Option 2: Pass Flags Explicitly

ansible-playbook -i inventory/ playbook.yml --vault-password-file ~/.ansible/vault_pass

This works but is tedious for daily use.

Option 3: Clone to a Native Linux Path

Clone the repo inside the WSL2 filesystem instead of on the Windows mount:

git clone https://git.example.com/repo.git ~/MajorAnsible

Native WSL2 paths (/home/user/...) have proper Linux permissions, so ansible.cfg loads normally. The tradeoff is that Windows tools can't easily access the repo.

You can change WSL2 mount permissions via /etc/wsl.conf:

[automount]
options = "metadata,umask=022"

This requires a wsl --shutdown and remount. It may break other Windows-Linux interop workflows and affects all mounted drives.

Diagnosis

To confirm whether Ansible is loading your config:

ansible --version

Look for the config file line. If it shows None instead of your project's ansible.cfg, the config is being ignored.