Installation

Introduction#

Installing Ansible in any OS, including Windows using Virtual Box and Vagrant. An alternate solution is also available if you just want to practice ansible ad-hoc commands and playbooks and do not wish to set up the local environment.

Installing Ansible on Ubuntu

Ansible maintains a PPA repository that can be used to install the Ansible binaries:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible -y
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ansible -y

To install a specific version, use pip. The PPA may be out of date.

Installing Ansible on MacOS

There are two main ways way to install Ansible on OS X, either using the Homebrew or Pip package manager.

If you have homebrew, the latest Ansible can be installed using the following command:

brew install ansible

To install Ansible 1.9.X branch use following command:

brew install homebrew/versions/ansible19

To install Ansible 2.0.X branch use following command:

brew install homebrew/versions/ansible20

To install using pip, use the following command: pip install ansible.

To install a specific version, use pip install ansible=<required version>.

Installation on Red Hat based systems

Ansible can be installed on CentOS or other Red Hat based systems. Firstly you should install the prerequisites:

sudo yum -y update
sudo yum -y install gcc libffi-devel openssl-devel python-pip python-devel

then install Ansible with pip:

sudo pip install ansible

I can recommend for you to upgrade the setuptools after the installation:

sudo pip install --upgrade setuptools

You can also use the local Package Manager as well:

yum install ansible

Installing from source

Ansible is best used from a checkout.

It runs as you (not root) and it has minimal python dependencies.

Python pip dependency install with pip:

sudo pip install paramiko PyYAML Jinja2 httplib2 six

Next, clone the Ansible repo from GitHub:

cd ~/Documents
git clone git://github.com/ansible/ansible.git --recursive 
cd ansible

Finally, add the ansible initialization script line to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc :

source ~/Documents/ansible/hacking/env-setup

Restart your terminal session, and test with

ansible --version

Installation on Amazon Linux from git repo

Amazon Linux is a RHEL variant, so the Red Hat instructions should work for the most part. There is, however, at least one discrepancy.

There was an instance where the python27-devel package, as opposed to python-devel, was explicitly necessary.

Here, we will install from source.

sudo yum -y update
sudo yum -y install python27 python27-devel openssl-devel libffi-devel gcc git

git clone https://github.com/ansible/ansible/<search the github for a preferable branch>

cd ansible
sudo python setup.py build
sudo python setup.py install

Installing Ansible On Any OS(windows) Machine Using Virtual Box+Vagrant

My laptop is having Windows 10. Here i am giving steps that you can follow to test and learn Ansible.

SOME THEORY

For Ansible you need a Control Machine and a host(or hosts) to run the Playbook.

Control Machine should be Linux based or MacOS(windows not allowed) and need Python (2.6 or higher version). Here Ansible will be installed.
Target machine (host/node) can be Linux/MacOS/windows. This needs only Python to be installed. No agent software required.

SETUP

Step 1: Install Virtual Box

Virtual box is a software to create virtual computers of different OS. It is like having multiple computers each or different OS and different versions.

Download Virtual Box according to the OS in your system and install it.

Step 2: Install Vagrant

Vagrant is Command Line Interface to create virtual machines in virtual box. This makes things easy. You need to learn basic Vagrant commands.

Step 3: Create a folder where you want your virtual machine

Step 4: Create Virtual Machine using Vagrant

Open terminal and go to the path where you created folder, and run the following two commands.

You need to select Virtual Box. I am installing Ubuntu for example. You can choose anything from the list. You need to run these two commands under ”virtual box” category: vagrant init ubuntu/trusty64 and vagrant up --provider virtualbox. Other categories might be: hyperv, vmware_desktop etc. (this will take some time, as it will download the necessary files)

Step 4: Install Ansible

For UbuntuOS: sudo apt-get install ansible

Alternative solution:

You can use Katacoda to practice ansible. No need to install or setup anything. Run two commands given in step 2 and after that, you are good to go.