Introduction
In the last article we talked about the power of ansible, it's importance and why you should consider using it in your company or on your next big project if you haven't been using it. Ansible is a configuration management tool that streamlines the process of controlling large number of servers. Ansible is just one of the other configuration tool out there, some of which includes puppet, chef.
In this tutorial we’ll discuss how to install Ansible on your machine (for this tutorial we'll be using a linux environment, ubuntu) and go over some basics of how to use this software.
Prerequisites
Before installing ansible you must have An Ansible Control Node which is the machine we'll install ansible on to configure other servers. The machine should have a non-root user with sudo privileges.
Installation
To install on ubuntu machine add the project official's PPA
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible
Then update
sudo apt update
Install ansible
sudo apt install ansible
You can also install ansible via python (This works for any OS).
Make sure you have python installed on your machine then run the following to install ansible
python3 -m pip install --user ansible
Use python for windows.
We've successfully installed ansible on our machine
Using ansible
Now let's use ansible!, one of the simplest way is first by creating an inventory file in your working directory.
touch inventory
in the inventory file, write the ip address or the domain name of the ansible hosts (machines you want to remotely access). For testing purposes you can input the ip address of your current machine with no space or just localhost.
NOTE: The ansible hosts(machines ansible want to run commands remotely) must accept ssh connection and also must have set up the required ssh key, if you are using your local machine as the ansible host for testing purposes, you might need to add the public key of your machine to authorized_keys so ssh via identity-file can work
Then Run
ceejay@ceejay:~/ceejay/ansible_practice$ ansible all --key-file ~/.ssh/id_rsa -i inventory -m ping
localhost | SUCCESS => {
"ansible_facts": {
"discovered_interpreter_python": "/usr/bin/python3"
},
"changed": false,
"ping": "pong"
}
-i - accepts the inventory file.
-m - The ansible module to use. There a lot of ansible modules, you can check them here. The ping module is basically just to test if ansible is able to ssh into the server.
You can also create an ansible config file ansible.cfg to define the basic configurations. Create this file in your working directory, this would override the default config file in /etc/ansible.
in the ansible.cfg file copy paste the following
[defaults]
inventory = inventory
private_key_file = ~/.ssh/id_rsa
Save this file and run
ceejay@ceejay:~/ceejay/ansible_practice$ ansible all -m ping
localhost | SUCCESS => {
"ansible_facts": {
"discovered_interpreter_python": "/usr/bin/python3"
},
"changed": false,
"ping": "pong"
}
This method makes it cleaner and easier to run.
We've just seen how to use ansible, in the coming article we'll explore more possibilities with ansible, there's so much more powerful stuffs you can do with ansible.
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