Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
124 lines (83 loc) · 4.42 KB

lab01-installing-ansible.md

File metadata and controls

124 lines (83 loc) · 4.42 KB
Raw

Lab 1: Lab Setup

Duration: 10 minutes

  • Task 1: Connect to the Student Workstation
  • Task 2: Check your environment for the correct prequisites
  • Task 3: Install Ansible
  • Task 4: Verify Installation and View the Config File

Task 1: Connect to the Student Workstation

In the previous lab, you learned how to connect to your workstation with either VSCode, SSH, or the web-based client.

One you've connected, make sure you've navigated to the /workstation/ansible directory. This is where we'll do all of our work for this training.

Task 2: Check your environment for the correct prequisites

Step 1.2.1

Run the following command to check your Python version

python --version

You should see something along the lines of:

Python 2.7.16

In order to properly run Ansible, you will need a minimum of Python 2 (version 2.7) or Python 3 (versions 3.5 and higher) installed. If you do not currently have the correct version of Python, you will need to update your Python version before proceeding.

If you need to install Python, you can run the following command:

sudo apt install python

Note: For your managed nodes, Ansible makes a connection over SSH and transfers modules using SFTP. If SSH works but SFTP is not available on some of your managed nodes, you can switch to SCP in ansible.cfg. For any machine or device that can run Python, you also need Python 2 (version 2.6 or later) or Python 3 (version 3.5 or later).

Task 3: Install Ansible

Step 1.3.1

Now that we've verified our prequisites, we can install Ansible.

Run the following command:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible

This command will include the official project’s PPA (personal package archive) on your workstation and designate your workstation as an Ansible control node

Step 1.3.2

Next, run this command to install the ansible software:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install ansible

This will install the Ansible software on your workstation. From here, you should be able to run the following command to verify successful installation:

ansible --version

And your output will look like this:

ansible 2.9.21
  config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
  configured module search path = [u'/home/ansible/.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 = 2.7.12 (default, Mar  1 2021, 11:38:31) [GCC 5.4.0 20160609]

Note: Your output should look slightly different depending on your operating system and file structure.

You should now have a working Ansible directory set up, as well as the Ansible software up and running on your workstation.

Task 4: Verify Installation and View the Config File

Step 1.4.1

Looking at the output of the ansible --version command, we can see that Ansible already specificied a default location for our ansible.cfg file. It should look something like this:

config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg

Let's go ahead and take a look at that file in order to get a feel for what Ansible is looking for during runtime:

head -n 30 /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg

You will notice that almost every single line of this config file is commented out. This is fine, as most of this information will be overridden during runtime for a typical Ansible deployment. However, notice this block of information:

#inventory      = /etc/ansible/hosts
#library        = /usr/share/my_modules/
#module_utils   = /usr/share/my_module_utils/
#remote_tmp     = ~/.ansible/tmp
#local_tmp      = ~/.ansible/tmp
#plugin_filters_cfg = /etc/ansible/plugin_filters.yml
#forks          = 5
#poll_interval  = 15
#sudo_user      = root
#ask_sudo_pass = True
#ask_pass      = True
#transport      = smart
#remote_port    = 22
#module_lang    = C
#module_set_locale = False

You will see a few different examples of what some default values might look like. Specifically, we are looking at the file location of the inventory. This is a default file that is included in every Ansible installation. We will be taking a good look at this in our next lab.

Take some time to look through the default ansible.cfg file. Don't feel that you need to read all of it. Just look through some of the commented blocks to start to get an idea of what kinds of information we can pass to Ansible for our future runs.