Installing Ansible on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Take a look at the official installation guide. The simplest way to install Ansible on Ubuntu is add the PPA repository and install via apt-get.

If not already installed, you will need the software-properties-common package.

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common

Then add the repository and install ansible.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ansible

Presumably you’ve already got an external server that you want to configure with Ansible. You will need SSH access, and if you’ve not already done so, you’re gonna want to setup key-based authentication. Assuming you’ve done that, you can test things are working with:

su -
mv -v /etc/ansible/hosts{,.original}
echo 134.213.48.162 > /etc/ansible/hosts
exit

I also need to tell ansible to connect as the root user.

sudo mkdir /etc/ansible/group_vars
sudo vim /etc/ansible/group_vars/all

Enter the following. The three dashes at the top indicate this is a yaml file.

---
ansible_ssh_user: root

You should now be able to test with the following.

ansible -m ping all

You should see output similar to the below if all went well.

andy@bastion:~$ ansible -m ping all
134.213.48.162 | success >> {
"changed": false,
"ping": "pong"
}