install-ansible.md

Install Ansible

Ansible will be used all across to automate installing things onto our VM. This guide covers the basic for installation and to verify that Ansible is working for local. Ansible install will work as well for any other command Ansible workflow.

Install

Refresh the system's package index:

sudo apt update

Install Ansible:

sudo apt install ansible

Check installed version:

$ ansible --version
ansible 2.10.8
  config file = None
  configured module search path = ['/home/rui/.ansible/plugins/modules', '/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
  ansible python module location = /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/ansible
  executable location = /usr/bin/ansible
  python version = 3.10.4 (main, Apr  2 2022, 09:04:19) [GCC 11.2.0]

Note Your $HOME should have your user. This rui is my case.

Testing a local playbook

Note I know very little about Ansible so make no assumptions about this process being the most correct. Certainly I'll come back to this and redo this guide/steps.

I've took inspiration from Adam Monsen Ansible Hello World and Alexey Zalesny How to run an Ansible playbook locally gist.

1. Create a playbooks folder:

   mkdir playbooks

2. Move to the new folder and create hosts file with the following content:

   [test]
   rui-virtual-machine ansible_connection=local
   

   Note This is my example hostname rui-virtual-machine change it accordingly to match your VM hostname.

3. Now create a file named hello.yml with the following content:

   - hosts: rui-virtual-machine
     tasks:
       # see https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/ping_module.html
       - name: test connection
         ping:
   

4. Let's run the playbook:

   $ ansible-playbook -i hosts hello.yml
   
   PLAY [rui-virtual-machine] **************************************************************************
   
   TASK [Gathering Facts] ******************************************************************************
   ok: [rui-virtual-machine]
   
   TASK [test connection] ******************************************************************************
   ok: [rui-virtual-machine]
   
   PLAY RECAP ******************************************************************************************
   rui-virtual-machine        : ok=2    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0
   

   Nice, we can run Ansible playbooks. We could also run the ping module directly and see more details about the hosts, in this case our guest VM:

   $ ansible all -i hosts -m ping
   rui-virtual-machine | SUCCESS => {
       "ansible_facts": {
           "discovered_interpreter_python": "/usr/bin/python3"
       },
       "changed": false,
       "ping": "pong"
   }