Ansible is a extra-simple tool/API for doing ‘parallel remote things’ over SSH – whether executing commands, running “modules”, or executing larger ‘playbooks’ that can serve as a configuration management or deployment system.
While Func installation which I co-wrote, aspired to avoid using SSH and have it’s own daemon infrastructure, Ansible aspires to be quite different and more minimal, but still able to grow more modularly over time. This is based on talking to a lot of users of various tools and wishing to eliminate problems with connectivity and long running daemons, or not picking tool X because they preferred to code in Y. Further, playbooks take things a whole step further, building the config and deployment system I always wanted to build.
Why use Ansible versus something else? (Fabric, Capistrano, mCollective, Func, SaltStack, etc?) It will have far less code, it will be more correct, and it will be the easiest thing to hack on and use you’ll ever see – regardless of your favorite language of choice. Want to only code plugins in bash or clojure? Ansible doesn’t care. The docs will fit on one page and the source will be blindingly obvious.
Requirements are extremely minimal.
If you are running python 2.6 on the overlord machine, you will need:
If you are running less than Python 2.6, you will also need:
On the managed nodes, to use templating, you will need:
Tagged releases are available as tar.gz files from the Ansible github project page:
You can also clone the git repository yourself and install Ansible in one of two ways:
You can install Ansible using Python Distutils:
$ git clone git://github.com/ansible/ansible.git
$ cd ./ansible
$ sudo make install
In the future, pre-built RPMs may be available. 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