How To Install Ansible on Debian 10

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ansible on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that simplifies cloud computing, configuration management, program setup, intra-service orchestration, and several other IT needs. Ansible uses a very simple language (YAML, in the form of Ansible Playbooks) that allows you to spell out your automation jobs in a way that means plain English. Using Ansible you can control multi-host or device simultaneously using a single command. You don’t need to install the client in the apparatus or each server.

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 a Debian 10 (Buster).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 10 (Buster).
• 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 Debian 10 Buster

Step 1. Before running the tutorial below, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt commands in the terminal:

sudo apt update

Step 2. Installing Ansible on Debian 10.

Ansible packages are available in default Debian 10 repositories, run the following commands from the command line to install Ansible:

sudo apt install ansible

Now, run the following command to check if Ansible is working correctly:

ansible --version

Step 3. Manage Linux Servers using Ansible.

First, we generate the ssh keys from the Ansible server and shared the keys among the Ansible hosts:

$ sudo -i
# ssh-keygen
# ssh-copy-id root@192.168.77.20
# ssh-copy-id root@192.168.77.21

When Ansible is installed then /etc/hosts the file is created automatically, in this file we can mention the ansible hosts or its clients. We can also create our own Ansible host inventory file in our home directory:

$ nano $HOME/hosts
[Web]
192.168.77.20
[DB]
192.168.77.21

Test and use default Ansible modules:

sudo ansible -i ~/hosts -m ping all
sudo ansible -i ~/hosts -m ping Web
sudo ansible -i ~/hosts -m ping DB

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