Installing Ansible on Linux and FreeBSD

The release cycle for Ansible is usually about four months, and during this short release cycle, there are normally many changes, from minor bug fixes to major ones, to new features and even sometimes fundamental changes to the language. The simplest way to not only get up and running with Ansible but to keep yourself up to date is to use the native packages built for your operating system where they are available.

For example, if you wish to run the latest version of Ansible on top of Linux distribution such as CentOS, Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Debian, and Ubuntu, I strongly recommend that you use an operating system package manager such as yum on Red Hat-based distributions or apt on Debian-based ones. In this manner, whenever you update your operating system, you will update Ansible simultaneously.

Of course, it might be that you need to retain a specific version of Ansible for certain purposes—perhaps because your playbooks have been tested with this. In this instance, you would almost certainly choose an alternative installation method, but this is beyond the scope of this book. Also, it is recommended that, where possible, you create and maintain your playbooks in line with documented best practices, which should mean that they survive most Ansible upgrades. 

The following are some examples showing how you might install Ansible on several Linux distributions:

• Installing Ansible on Ubuntu: To install the latest version of the Ansible control machine on Ubuntu, the apt packaging tool makes it easy using the following commands:

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

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

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

• Installing Ansible on Gentoo: To install the latest version of the Ansible control machine on Gentoo, the portage package manager makes it easy with the following commands:

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

• Installing Ansible on FreeBSD: To install the latest version of the Ansible control machine on FreeBSD, the PKG manager makes it easy with the following commands:

$ sudo pkg install py36-ansible
$ sudo make -C /usr/ports/sysutils/ansible install

• Installing Ansible on Fedora: To install the latest version of the Ansible control machine on Fedora, the dnf package manager makes it easy with the following commands:

$ sudo dnf -y install ansible

• Installing Ansible on CentOS: To install the latest version of the Ansible control machine on CentOS or RHEL, the yum package manager makes it easy with the following commands:

$ sudo yum install epel-release
$ sudo yum -y install ansible

If you execute the preceding commands on RHEL, you have to make sure that the Ansible repository is enabled. If it's not, you need to enable the relevant repository with the following commands:

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

• Installing Ansible on Arch Linux: To install the latest version of the Ansible control machine on Arch Linux, the pacman package manager makes it easy with the following commands:

$ pacman -S ansible

Once you have installed Ansible on the specific Linux distribution that you use, you can begin to explore. Let's start with a simple example—when you run the ansible command, you will see output similar to the following: 

$ ansible --version
ansible 2.9.6
 config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
 configured module search path = [u'/home/jamesf_local/.ansible/plugins/modules', u'/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
 ansible python module location = /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ansible
 executable location = /usr/bin/ansible
 python version = 2.7.17 (default, Nov 7 2019, 10:07:09) [GCC 9.2.1 20191008]

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

Now that you have seen how to install Ansible on Linux, we'll take a brief look at how to install Ansible on macOS.