Installing Ansible¶

This page describes how to install Ansible on different platforms. Ansible is an agentless automation tool that by default manages machines over the SSH protocol. Once installed, Ansible does not add a database, and there will be no daemons to start or keep running. You only need to install it on one machine (which could easily be a laptop) and it can manage an entire fleet of remote machines from that central point. When Ansible manages remote machines, it does not leave software installed or running on them, so there’s no real question about how to upgrade Ansible when moving to a new version.

Prerequisites ¶

You install Ansible on a control node, which then uses SSH (by default) to communicate with your managed nodes (those end devices you want to automate).

Control node requirements ¶

Currently Ansible can be run from any machine with Python 2 (version 2.7) or Python 3 (versions 3.5 and higher) installed. This includes Red Hat, Debian, CentOS, macOS, any of the BSDs, and so on. Windows is not supported for the control node.

When choosing a control node, bear in mind that any management system benefits from being run near the machines being managed. If you are running Ansible in a cloud, consider running it from a machine inside that cloud. In most cases this will work better than on the open Internet.

Note

macOS by default is configured for a small number of file handles, so if you want to use 15 or more forks you’ll need to raise the ulimit with sudo launchctl limit maxfiles unlimited. This command can also fix any “Too many open files” error.

Warning

Please note that some modules and plugins have additional requirements. For modules these need to be satisfied on the ‘target’ machine (the managed node) and should be listed in the module specific docs.

Managed node requirements ¶

On the managed nodes, you need a way to communicate, which is normally SSH. By default this uses SFTP. If that’s not available, you can switch to SCP in ansible.cfg. You also need Python 2 (version 2.6 or later) or Python 3 (version 3.5 or later).

Note

If you have SELinux enabled on remote nodes, you will also want to install libselinux-python on them before using any copy/file/template related functions in Ansible. You can use the yum module or dnf module in Ansible to install this package on remote systems that do not have it.
By default, Ansible uses the Python interpreter located at /usr/bin/python to run its modules. However, some Linux distributions may only have a Python 3 interpreter installed to /usr/bin/python3 by default. On those systems, you may see an error like:
```
"module_stdout": "/bin/sh: /usr/bin/python: No such file or directory\r\n"
```
you can either set the ansible_python_interpreter inventory variable (see How to build your inventory) to point at your interpreter or you can install a Python 2 interpreter for modules to use. You will still need to set ansible_python_interpreter if the Python 2 interpreter is not installed to /usr/bin/python.
Ansible’s raw module, and the script module, do not depend on a client side install of Python to run. Technically, you can use Ansible to install a compatible version of Python using the raw module, which then allows you to use everything else. For example, if you need to bootstrap Python 2 onto a RHEL-based system, you can install it as follows:
```
$ ansible myhost --become -m raw -a "yum install -y python2"
```

Selecting an Ansible version to install ¶

Which Ansible version to install is based on your particular needs. You can choose any of the following ways to install Ansible:

Install the latest release with your OS package manager (for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (TM), CentOS, Fedora, Debian, or Ubuntu).
Install with pip (the Python package manager).
Install from source to access the development (devel) version to develop or test the latest features.

Note

You should only run Ansible from devel if you are actively developing content for Ansible. This is a rapidly changing source of code and can become unstable at any point.

Ansible creates new releases two to three times a year. Due to this short release cycle, minor bugs will generally be fixed in the next release versus maintaining backports on the stable branch. Major bugs will still have maintenance releases when needed, though these are infrequent.

Installing Ansible on RHEL, CentOS, or Fedora ¶

On Fedora:

$ sudo dnf install ansible

On RHEL and CentOS:

$ sudo yum install ansible

RPMs for RHEL 7 and RHEL 8 are available from the Ansible Engine repository.

To enable the Ansible Engine repository for RHEL 8, run the following command:

$ sudo subscription-manager repos --enable ansible-2.9-for-rhel-8-x86_64-rpms

To enable the Ansible Engine repository for RHEL 7, run the following command:

$ sudo subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-ansible-2.9-rpms

RPMs for currently supported versions of RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora are available from EPEL as well as releases.ansible.com.

Ansible version 2.4 and later can manage earlier operating systems that contain Python 2.6 or higher.

You can also build an RPM yourself. From the root of a checkout or tarball, use the make rpm command to build an RPM you can distribute and install.

$ git clone https://github.com/ansible/ansible.git
$ cd ./ansible
$ make rpm
$ sudo rpm -Uvh ./rpm-build/ansible-*.noarch.rpm

Installing Ansible on Ubuntu ¶

Ubuntu builds are available in a PPA here.

To configure the PPA on your machine and install Ansible run these commands:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install software-properties-common
$ sudo apt-add-repository --yes --update ppa:ansible/ansible
$ sudo apt install ansible

Note

On older Ubuntu distributions, “software-properties-common” is called “python-software-properties”. You may want to use apt-get instead of apt in older versions. Also, be aware that only newer distributions (i.e. 18.04, 18.10, etc.) have a -u or --update flag, so adjust your script accordingly.

Debian/Ubuntu packages can also be built from the source checkout, run:

$ make deb

You may also wish to run from source to get the development branch, which is covered below.

Installing Ansible on Debian ¶

Debian users may leverage the same source as the Ubuntu PPA.

Add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ansible/ansible/ubuntu trusty main

Then run these commands:

$ sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 93C4A3FD7BB9C367
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install ansible

Note

This method has been verified with the Trusty sources in Debian Jessie and Stretch but may not be supported in earlier versions. You may want to use apt-get instead of apt in older versions.

Installing Ansible on Gentoo with portage ¶

$ emerge -av app-admin/ansible

To install the newest version, you may need to unmask the Ansible package prior to emerging:

$ echo 'app-admin/ansible' >> /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords

Installing Ansible on FreeBSD ¶

Though Ansible works with both Python 2 and 3 versions, FreeBSD has different packages for each Python version. So to install you can use:

$ sudo pkg install py27-ansible

or:

$ sudo pkg install py36-ansible

You may also wish to install from ports, run:

$ sudo make -C /usr/ports/sysutils/ansible install

You can also choose a specific version, i.e ansible25.

Older versions of FreeBSD worked with something like this (substitute for your choice of package manager):

$ sudo pkg install ansible

Installing Ansible on macOS ¶

The preferred way to install Ansible on a Mac is with pip.

The instructions can be found in Installing Ansible with pip. If you are running macOS version 10.12 or older, then you should upgrade to the latest pip to connect to the Python Package Index securely.

Installing Ansible on Solaris ¶

Ansible is available for Solaris as SysV package from OpenCSW.

# pkgadd -d http://get.opencsw.org/now
# /opt/csw/bin/pkgutil -i ansible

Installing Ansible on Arch Linux ¶

Ansible is available in the Community repository:

$ pacman -S ansible

The AUR has a PKGBUILD for pulling directly from GitHub called ansible-git.

Also see the Ansible page on the ArchWiki.

Installing Ansible on Slackware Linux ¶

Ansible build script is available in the SlackBuilds.org repository. Can be built and installed using sbopkg.

Create queue with Ansible and all dependencies:

# sqg -p ansible

Build and install packages from a created queuefile (answer Q for question if sbopkg should use queue or package):

# sbopkg -k -i ansible

Installing Ansible on Clear Linux ¶

Ansible and its dependencies are available as part of the sysadmin host management bundle:

$ sudo swupd bundle-add sysadmin-hostmgmt

Update of the software will be managed by the swupd tool:

$ sudo swupd update

Installing Ansible with `pip`¶

Ansible can be installed with pip, the Python package manager. If pip isn’t already available on your system of Python, run the following commands to install it:

$ curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py
$ python get-pip.py --user

Then install Ansible 1:

$ pip install --user ansible

Or if you are looking for the development version:

$ pip install --user git+https://github.com/ansible/ansible.git@devel

If you are installing on macOS Mavericks (10.9), you may encounter some noise from your compiler. A workaround is to do the following:

$ CFLAGS=-Qunused-arguments CPPFLAGS=-Qunused-arguments pip install --user ansible

In order to use the paramiko connection plugin or modules that require paramiko, install the required module 2:

$ pip install --user paramiko

Ansible can also be installed inside a new or existing virtualenv:

$ python -m virtualenv ansible  # Create a virtualenv if one does not already exist
$ source ansible/bin/activate   # Activate the virtual environment
$ pip install ansible

If you wish to install Ansible globally, run the following commands:

$ sudo python get-pip.py
$ sudo pip install ansible

Note

Running pip with sudo will make global changes to the system. Since pip does not coordinate with system package managers, it could make changes to your system that leaves it in an inconsistent or non-functioning state. This is particularly true for macOS. Installing with --user is recommended unless you understand fully the implications of modifying global files on the system.

Note

Older versions of pip default to http://pypi.python.org/simple, which no longer works. Please make sure you have the latest version of pip before installing Ansible. If you have an older version of pip installed, you can upgrade by following pip’s upgrade instructions .

Running Ansible from source (devel)¶

Note

You should only run Ansible from devel if you are actively developing content for Ansible. This is a rapidly changing source of code and can become unstable at any point.

Ansible 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.

Note

If you want to use Ansible Tower as the control node, do not use a source installation of Ansible. Please use an OS package manager (like apt or yum) or pip to install a stable version.

To install from source, clone the Ansible git repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/ansible/ansible.git
$ cd ./ansible

Once git has cloned the Ansible repository, setup the Ansible environment:

Using Bash:

$ source ./hacking/env-setup

Using Fish:

$ source ./hacking/env-setup.fish

If you want to suppress spurious warnings/errors, use:

$ source ./hacking/env-setup -q

If you don’t have pip installed in your version of Python, install it:

$ curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py
$ python get-pip.py --user

Ansible also uses the following Python modules that need to be installed 1:

$ pip install --user -r ./requirements.txt

To update Ansible checkouts, use pull-with-rebase so any local changes are replayed.

$ git pull --rebase

$ git pull --rebase #same as above
$ git submodule update --init --recursive

Once running the env-setup script you’ll be running from checkout and the default inventory file will be /etc/ansible/hosts. You can optionally specify an inventory file (see How to build your inventory) other than /etc/ansible/hosts:

$ echo "127.0.0.1" > ~/ansible_hosts
$ export ANSIBLE_INVENTORY=~/ansible_hosts

You can read more about the inventory file at How to build your inventory.

Now let’s test things with a ping command:

$ ansible all -m ping --ask-pass

You can also use “sudo make install”.

Finding tarballs of tagged releases ¶

Packaging Ansible or wanting to build a local package yourself, but don’t want to do a git checkout? Tarballs of releases are available on the Ansible downloads page.

These releases are also tagged in the git repository with the release version.

Ansible command shell completion ¶

As of Ansible 2.9, shell completion of the Ansible command line utilities is available and provided through an optional dependency called argcomplete. argcomplete supports bash, and has limited support for zsh and tcsh.

You can install python-argcomplete from EPEL on Red Hat Enterprise based distributions, and or from the standard OS repositories for many other distributions.

For more information about installing and configuration see the argcomplete documentation.

Installing `argcomplete` on RHEL, CentOS, or Fedora ¶

On Fedora:

$ sudo dnf install python-argcomplete

On RHEL and CentOS:

$ sudo yum install epel-release
$ sudo yum install python-argcomplete

Installing `argcomplete` with `apt`¶

$ sudo apt install python-argcomplete

Installing `argcomplete` with `pip`¶

$ pip install argcomplete

Configuring `argcomplete`¶

There are 2 ways to configure argcomplete to allow shell completion of the Ansible command line utilities: globally or per command.

Globally ¶

Global completion requires bash 4.2.

$ sudo activate-global-python-argcomplete

This will write a bash completion file to a global location. Use --dest to change the location.

Per command ¶

If you do not have bash 4.2, you must register each script independently.

$ eval $(register-python-argcomplete ansible)
$ eval $(register-python-argcomplete ansible-config)
$ eval $(register-python-argcomplete ansible-console)
$ eval $(register-python-argcomplete ansible-doc)
$ eval $(register-python-argcomplete ansible-galaxy)
$ eval $(register-python-argcomplete ansible-inventory)
$ eval $(register-python-argcomplete ansible-playbook)
$ eval $(register-python-argcomplete ansible-pull)
$ eval $(register-python-argcomplete ansible-vault)

You should place the above commands into your shells profile file such as ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile.

`argcomplete` with zsh or tcsh ¶

See the argcomplete documentation.

Ansible on GitHub ¶

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.