How To Install Ansible on AlmaLinux 8

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ansible on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Ansible is a free and open-source automation tool that allows system administrators to configure and control hundreds of nodes from a central server without the need of installing any agents on the nodes. Unlike Puppet and Chef, Ansible is agent-less. Ansible uses declarative language to define system configurations and uses SSH service and Python scripts to apply configurations on the managed nodes.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Ansible on AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: AlmaLinux 8.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Ansible on AlmaLinux 8

Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.

sudo dnf update
sudo dnf upgrade
sudo dnf install epel-release

Step 2. Installing Python.

Run the following commands to install python 3 and other dependencies:

sudo dnf module install python38
sudo alternatives --config python

Step 3. Installing Ansible on AlmaLinux 8.

• Install Ansible from the official repository AlmaLinux.

Now we run the following command below to install Ansible to your system:

sudo dnf install ansible

• Install Ansible using Python.

Run the following commands to install Ansible:

sudo pip3 install setuptools-rust wheel
sudo pip3 install --upgrade pip
sudo python -m pip install ansible

Once done, verify the installation using the following command:

$ ansible --version

  ansible 2.9.26
  config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
  configured module search path = ['/root/.ansible/plugins/modules', '/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
  ansible python module location = /usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/ansible
  executable location = /usr/bin/ansible
  python version = 3.6.9 (default, Jul 21 2021, 16:00:46) [GCC 8.4.1 20200928 (Red Hat 8.4.2-2)]

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Ansible. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Ansible on your AlmaLinux 8 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Ansible website.