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Ansible Overview and Installation

Ansible Overview and Installation

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Rishi Beesu
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2 min read

Table of contents

Ansible Overview

What is Ansible

Ansible is a configuration management tool used to automate configuration management, application deployment, infrastructure provisioning and orchestration

Key Features of Ansible

  • Ansible is agentless i.e it doesn’t require any program to be installed on target systems for working on target systems

  • Ansible is a declarative language i.e you just need to know what your desired state is and how to reach that state is taken care of ansible

  • Ansible follows idempotent execution i.e the ansible checks the state of the system and applies changes only if necessary

Benefits of Ansible

  • Ansible uses YAML format which is easy to read

  • Ansible can handle large and complex ecosystems efficiently

  • Ansible can manage heterogeneous environments having multiple different operating systems efficiently

Installing Ansible

Prerequisites

A Virtual Machine or an EC2 instance with an EPEL repository

# Installing EPEL Release
sudo yum install <https://dl.fedoraproject.ortg/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-9.noarch.rpm> -y

Installation and Configuration

Installing Ansible

sudo yum install ansible -y

Verifying ansible installation

sudo ansible --version

Creating a new user for managing ansible in both master and target and giving sudo permissions

# Creating ansible user
sudo useradd ansadmin

# Creating password for ansible user
sudo passwd ansadmin

# Giving ansible user admin priviliges by adding them into visudo file
sudo visudo

# Add below line in the sudoers or visudo file
ansadmin ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL

Enabling password-based authentication for login to the Ansible server through SSH if you are using an EC2 instance, you can also use key-based authentication if you require

# Changing no to yes in PasswordAuthentication parameter in sshd_config file
sudo sed -ie 's/PasswordAuthentication no/PasswordAuthentication yes/' /etc/ssh/sshd_config

# Restarting SSH service for changes to take place
sudo systemctl restart sshd

Enabling password-less authentication between Ansible master and slave

# Login as ansible user
sudo su ansadmin

# Generate SSH key
ssh-keygen

# Copying SSH key to target system
ssh-copy-id <target-server-IP>

Giving ownership of /etc/ansible to ansadmin user

sudo chown -R ansadmin:ansadmin /etc/ansible

Adding target server IP to ansible inventory file

echo "<target-server-IP>" > /etc/ansible/hosts

For checking the connectivity between the ansible master and the target system

# Pinging ansible target system
ansible all -m ping
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