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 doesnot 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.

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).

Oct 24, 2019. Oct 12, 2017.

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, read more about this in Matt Davis’s blog post.

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 sudolaunchctllimitmaxfilesunlimited. 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.

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

Note

If you have SELinux enabled on remote nodes, you will also want to installlibselinux-python on them before using any copy/file/template related functions in Ansible. Youcan use the yum module or dnf module in Ansible to install this package on remote systemsthat do not have it.
By default, before the first Python module in a playbook runs on a host, Ansible attempts to discover a suitable Python interpreter on that host. You can override the discovery behavior by setting the ansible_python_interpreter inventory variable to a specific interpreter, and in other ways. See Interpreter Discovery for details.
Ansible’s raw module, and the script module, do not dependon a client side install of Python to run. Technically, you can use Ansible to install a compatibleversion 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 itas follows:

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 ansible-base from source to access the development (devel) version to develop or test the latest features.

Note

You should only run ansible-base from devel if you are modifying ansible-base, or trying out features under development. 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 rather than maintaining backports on the stable branch.Major bugs will still have maintenance releases when needed, though these are infrequent.

On Fedora:

On RHEL and CentOS:

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:

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

RPMs for currently supported versions of RHEL and CentOS are also available from EPEL.

Note

Since Ansible 2.10 for RHEL is not available at this time, continue to use Ansible 2.9.

Ansible can manage older operating systems that contain Python 2.6 or higher.

Ubuntu builds are available in a PPA here.

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

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 (in other words, 18.04, 18.10, and so on) have a -u or --update flag, so adjust your script accordingly.

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

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

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

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

Then run these commands:

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.

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

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

or:

You may also wish to install from ports, run:

You can also choose a specific version, for example ansible25.

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

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. It should be noted that pip must be run as a module on macOS, and the linked pip instructions will show you how to do that.

Note

If you have Ansible 2.9 or older installed, you need to use pipuninstallansible first to remove older versions of Ansible before re-installing it.

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

Ansible is available for Solaris as SysV package from OpenCSW.

Ansible Download Mac Os X 10.13

Ansible is available in the Community repository:

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

Also see the Ansible page on the ArchWiki.

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

Create queue with Ansible and all dependencies:

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

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

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

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:

Note

If you have