Requirements for Ansible are extremely minimal.
Ansible is written for Python 2.6. If you are running Python 2.5 on an “Enterprise Linux” variant, your distribution can easily install 2.6 (see instructions in the next section). Newer versions of Linux and OS X should already have 2.6.
In additon to Python 2.6, you will want the following packages:
On the managed nodes, you only need Python 2.4 or later, but if you are are running less than Python 2.6 on them, you will also need:
(Note that even that’s not quite true. Ansible’s “raw” module (for executing commands in a quick and dirty way) and the copy module – some of the most basic features in ansible don’t even need that. So technically, you can use Ansible to install python-simplejson using the raw module, which then allows you to use everything else. That’s jumping ahead though.)
These distributions don’t have Python 2.6 by default, but it is easily installable.
If you are interested in using all the latest features, you may wish to keep up to date with the development branch of the git checkout. This also makes it easiest to contribute back to the project.
Instructions for installing from source are below.
Ansible’s release cycles are about one month long. Due to this short release cycle, any bugs will generally be fixed in the next release versus maintaining backports on the stable branch.
You may also wish to follow the Github project if you have a github account. This is also where we keep the issue tracker for sharing bugs and feature ideas.
Ansible is trivially easy to run from a checkout, root permissions are not required to use it:
$ git clone git://github.com/ansible/ansible.git
$ cd ./ansible
$ source ./hacking/env-setup
You can optionally specify an inventory file (see Inventory & Patterns) other than /etc/ansible/hosts:
$ echo "127.0.0.1" > ~/ansible_hosts
$ export ANSIBLE_HOSTS=~/ansible_hosts
Now let’s test things:
$ ansible all -m ping --ask-pass
If you are not working from a distribution where Ansible is packaged yet, you can install Ansible using “make install”. This is done through python-distutils:
$ git clone git://github.com/ansible/ansible.git
$ cd ./ansible
$ sudo make install
RPMs for the last Ansible release are available for EPEL 6 and currently supported Fedora distributions.
# install the epel-release RPM if needed on CentOS, RHEL, or Scientific Linux $ sudo yum install ansible
You can also use the make rpm command to build an RPM you can distribute and install:
$ git clone git://github.com/ansible/ansible.git
$ cd ./ansible
$ make rpm
$ sudo rpm -Uvh ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/ansible-*.noarch.rpm
Note that if you are tracking the upstream source (i.e. git), the RPM revision will not be bumped with every source code change. To get around this, you can use rpm -Uvh with --force when RPM tells you the package is still at the same version. This is perfectly safe to do.
Gentoo eBuilds are available here
Debian package recipes can be built from the source checkout, run:
make debian
An Arch PKGBUILD is available on AUR If you have python3 installed on Arch, you probably want to symlink python to python2:
sudo ln -sf /usr/bin/python2 /usr/bin/python
If you would like to package Ansible for Homebrew, BSD, or others, please stop by the mailing list and say hi!
Tagged releases are available as tar.gz files from the Ansible github project page:
By default, ansible uses paramiko to talk to managed nodes over SSH. Paramiko is fast, works very transparently, requires no configuration, and is a good choice for most users. However, it does not support some advanced SSH features that folks will want to use.
Starting in version 0.5, if you want to leverage more advanced SSH features (such as Kerberized SSH or jump hosts), pass the flag “–connection=ssh” to any ansible command, or set the ANSIBLE_TRANSPORT environment variable to ‘ssh’. This will cause Ansible to use openssh tools instead.
If ANSIBLE_SSH_ARGS are not set, ansible will try to use some sensible ControlMaster options by default. You are free to override this environment variable, but should still pass ControlMaster options to ensure performance of this transport. With ControlMaster in use, both transports are roughly the same speed. Without CM, the binary ssh transport is signficantly slower.
If none of this makes sense to you, the default paramiko option is probably fine.
Now that you’ve installed Ansible, it’s time to test it.
Edit (or create) /etc/ansible/hosts and put one or more remote systems in it, for which you have your SSH key in authorized_keys:
192.168.1.50
aserver.example.org
bserver.example.org
Set up SSH agent to avoid retyping passwords:
ssh-agent bash
ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa
(Depending on your setup, you may wish to ansible’s –private-key-file option to specify a pem file instead)
Now ping all your nodes:
ansible all -m ping
If you want to access machines remotely as a different user than root, you will want to specify the ‘-u’ option to ansible. If you would like to access sudo mode, there are also flags to do that:
# as bruce
ansible all -m ping -u bruce
# as bruce, sudoing to root
ansible all -m ping -u bruce --sudo
# as bruce, sudoing to batman
ansible all -m ping -u bruce --sudo --sudo-user batman
Now run a live command on all of your nodes:
ansible all -a "/bin/echo hello"
Congratulations. You’ve just contacted your nodes with Ansible. It’s now time to read some of the more real-world Command Line, and explore what you can do with different modules, as well as the Ansible Playbooks language. Ansible is not just about running commands, it also has powerful configuration management and deployment features. There’s more to explore, but you already have a fully working infrastructure!
See also