Ansible is an agentless automation tool that you install on a single host (referred to as the control node). From the control node, Ansible can manage an entire fleet of machines and other devices (referred to as managed nodes) remotely with SSH, Powershell remoting, and numerous other transports, all from a simple command-line interface with no databases or daemons required.
For your control node (the machine that runs Ansible), you can use nearly any UNIX-like machine with Python 3.8 or newer installed. This includes Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, macOS, BSDs, and Windows under a `Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) distribution <https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about>`_. Windows without WSL is not natively supported as a control node; see `Matt Davis' blog post <http://blog.rolpdog.com/2020/03/why-no-ansible-controller-for-windows.html>`_ for more information.
Ansible's community packages are distributed in two ways: a minimalist language and runtime package called ``ansible-core``, and a much larger "batteries included" package called ``ansible``, which adds a community-curated selection of :ref:`Ansible Collections <collections>` for automating a wide variety of devices. Choose the package that fits your needs; The following instructions use ``ansible``, but you can substitute ``ansible-core`` if you prefer to start with a more minimal package and separately install only the Ansible Collections you require. The ``ansible`` or ``ansible-core`` packages may be available in your operating systems package manager, and you are free to install these packages with your preferred method. These installation instructions only cover the officially supported means of installing the python package with ``pip``.
Locate and remember the path to the Python interpreter you wish to use to run Ansible. The following instructions refer to this Python as ``python3``. For example, if you've determined that you want the Python at ``/usr/bin/python3.9`` to be the one that you'll install Ansible under, specify that instead of ``python3``.
If you see an error like ``No module named pip``, you'll need to install ``pip`` under your chosen Python interpreter before proceeding. This may mean installing an additional OS package (for example, ``python3-pip``), or installing the latest ``pip`` directly from the Python Packaging Authority by running the following:
You may need to perform some additional configuration before you are able to run Ansible. See the Python documentation on `installing to the user site`_ for more information.
.._installing to the user site: https://packaging.python.org/tutorials/installing-packages/#installing-to-the-user-site
If you are testing new features, fixing bugs, or otherwise working with the development team on changes to the core code, you can install and run the source from GitHub.
You should only install and run the ``devel`` branch if you are modifying ``ansible-core`` or trying out features under development. This is a rapidly changing source of code and can become unstable at any point.
For more information on getting involved in the Ansible project, see the :ref:`ansible_community_guide`. For more information on creating Ansible modules and Collections, see the :ref:`developer_guide`.
You can replace ``devel`` in the URL mentioned above, with any other branch or tag on GitHub to install older versions of Ansible, tagged alpha or beta versions, and release candidates.
``ansible-core`` is easy to run from source. You do not need ``root`` permissions to use it and there is no software to actually install. No daemons or database setup are required.
You can add shell completion of the Ansible command line utilities by installing an optional dependency called ``argcomplete``. ``argcomplete`` supports bash, and has limited support for zsh and tcsh.
