Ansible is a popular open source software used for automation and configuration management. Agentless architecture and it’s cross platform compatibility are some features that helped it to gain large and active community.

Before setup we must be familiar with the use case of Ansible. Configuration management, infrastructure provisioning, application deployment, etc are some use cases of Ansible.

Step 1: Installing Ansible in Ubuntu

Update packages

sudo apt update
#then run
sudo apt install software-properties-common
#The software-properties-common package provides a set of utility scripts for managing software properties, such as adding and removing repositories.

After that add ansible into your repository. A PPA is a third-party repository that provides packages for a specific software or tool that may not be available in the official Ubuntu repositories. In this case, the Ansible PPA provides the latest version of Ansible for Ubuntu.

sudo add-apt-repository --yes --update ppa:ansible/ansible

Once you have added the Ansible PPA to your system, you can install Ansible using the

sudo apt install ansible

Verify the installation using command.

ansible --version

If you are using different distro or operating system you can refer to this document:

Installing Ansible on specific operating systems – Ansible Documentation

Installing Ansible on specific operating systems

https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/installation_guide/installation_distros.html#installing-ansible-on-ubuntu

Step 2: Configuring ansible in your control node

Ansible uses an inventory files to define the systems it will manage. You can edit the file /etc/hosts/

as:

Or you can simple edit the contents in the syntax:

[servers]
server1 ansible_host=<IP or hostname of the first server>
server2 ansible_host=<IP or hostname of the second server>

Step 3: Add ansible user to the servers

You can use the command to generate keys for test user.

ssh-keygen

Now you can copy these keys to the server. The basic syntax to copy id’s is

ssh-copy-id username@host

You will get similar output as shown in figure below.

Step 4: Test the connection using ping

From the control server you can ping both two servers. You can use the command to test the connection.

ansible all -m ping

You can see the output as:

To view server uptime you can use the command:

ansible all -m shell -a "uptime"

You can see the output as:

You can use yaml configuration file to do some complex tasks in your servers. This can be done using ansible-playbook which will be described detail in upcoming parts.

Thanks!

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