Installing Ansible

Ansible is an open source, agentless automation engine for software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment. Its first release was in 2012 and its basic version is free for both, personal and commercial use. The enterprise version, called Ansible Tower, provides GUI management and dashboards, REST API, role-based access control, and some more features.

We present the installation process and a description of how it can be used separately as well as together with Docker.

Ansible server requirements

Ansible uses the SSH protocol for communication and has no special requirements regarding the machine it manages. There is also no central master server, so it's enough to install the Ansible client tool anywhere and we can already use it to manage the whole infrastructure.

Note

The only requirement for the machines being managed is to have the Python tool and, obviously, the SSH server installed. These tools are, however, almost always available by default...