Getting Started

How to download ansible and get started using it

examples: Examples of basic commands
playbooks: Learning ansible's configuration management language

Requirements

Requirements for Ansible are extremely minimal.

If you are running python 2.6 on the overlord machine (the machine that you'll be talking to the other machines from), you will need:

paramiko
PyYAML
python-jinja2 (for playbooks)

If you are running less than Python 2.6, you will also need:

The Python 2.4 or 2.5 backport of the multiprocessing module
- Installation and Testing Instructions
simplejson

On the managed nodes, to use templating, you will need:

python-jinja2 (you can install this with ansible)

Developer Requirements

For developers, you may wish to have:

asciidoc (for building manpage documentation)
python-sphinx (for building content for the ansible.github.com project only)

Getting Ansible

Tagged releases are available as tar.gz files from the Ansible github project page:

Ansible/downloads

You can also clone the git repository yourself and install Ansible in one of two ways:

Python Distutils

You can also install Ansible using Python Distutils:

$ git clone git://github.com/ansible/ansible.git
$ cd ./ansible
$ sudo make install

Via RPM

In the near future, pre-built RPMs will be available through your distribution. Until that time you can use the make rpm command:

$ git clone git://github.com/ansible/ansible.git
$ cd ./ansible
$ make rpm
$ sudo rpm -Uvh ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/ansible-1.0-1.noarch.rpm

Your first commands

Edit /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

Now ping all your nodes:

ansible all -m ping

Now run a live command on all of your nodes:

ansible all /bin/echo hello

Congratulations. You've just contacted your nodes with Ansible. It's now time to read some of the more real-world examples, and explore what you can do with different modules, as well as the Ansible playbooks language. Ansible is not just about running commands, but you already have a working infrastructure!

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