Ansible is a radically simple IT automation system. It handles configuration-management, application deployment, cloud provisioning, ad-hoc task-execution, and multinode orchestration - including trivializing things like zero-downtime rolling updates with load balancers.
You can find installation instructions [here](https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/intro_installation.html) for a variety of platforms. Most users should probably install a released version of Ansible from `pip`, a package manager or our [release repository](https://releases.ansible.com/ansible/). [Officially supported](https://www.ansible.com/ansible-engine) builds of Ansible are also available. Some power users run directly from the development branch - while significant efforts are made to ensure that `devel` is reasonably stable, you're more likely to encounter breaking changes when running Ansible this way.
* Read [Community Information](https://docs.ansible.com/community.html) for all kinds of ways to contribute to and interact with the project, including mailing list information and how to submit bug reports and code to Ansible.
* All code submissions are done through pull requests. Take care to make sure no merge commits are in the submission, and use `git rebase` vs `git merge` for this reason. If submitting a large code change (other than modules), it's probably a good idea to join ansible-devel and talk about what you would like to do or add first and to avoid duplicate efforts. This not only helps everyone know what's going on, it also helps save time and effort if we decide some changes are needed.
Ansible was created by [Michael DeHaan](https://github.com/mpdehaan) (michael.dehaan/gmail/com) and has contributions from over 1000 users (and growing). Thanks everyone!
