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: Ansible 0.4 will have ways to remote bootstrap this, using Ansible itself. Stay tuned.
These distributions don’t have Python 2.6 by default, but it is easily installable.
As the project is still pretty new, you will probably want to clone the git checkout, so you can keep up with all of the latest features, and also easily contribute back to the project (if you want).
Instructions for installing from source are below.
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 doc: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
In the near future, pre-built packages will be available through your distribution. Until that time, you can 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 are in progress – see the source checkout, in the packaging/debian directory.
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:
At this point in Ansible’s development, running or building from checkout is preferred if you want access to all of the latest modules and improvements.
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
Now ping all your nodes:
ansible all -m ping
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 Examples, 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