In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ansible on Debian 9 Stretch. For those of you who didn’t know, Ansible is an open-source automation platform that enables you to manage and configure systems, deploy applications, and orchestrate IT processes. It operates using an agentless architecture, which means it doesn’t require any additional software to be installed on the managed nodes, making it lightweight and efficient.

One of Ansible’s key strengths is its use of YAML (Yet Another Markup Language), a human-readable data serialization format. This makes it easy to write and understand Ansible playbooks, which are essentially scripts that define the desired state of your systems.

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 9 (Stretch) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 9 (Stretch).
• 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 9 Stretch

Step 1. efore installing Ansible, it’s a good practice to update your system’s package index and upgrade any existing packages to their latest versions. Open a terminal and run the following commands:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Installing Ansible on Debian 9.

Ansible is not included in the default Debian repositories, so you’ll need to download Ansible source code using the git command:

git clone git://github.com/ansible/ansible.git

Next, navigate to the Ansible directory:

cd ansible

Use the following Linux command will list all available Ansible stable versions:

### git branch -a | grep stable
  remotes/origin/stable-1.9
  remotes/origin/stable-2.0
  remotes/origin/stable-2.0-network
  remotes/origin/stable-2.0.0.1
  remotes/origin/stable-2.1
  remotes/origin/stable-2.2
  remotes/origin/stable-2.3

Take note of your desired version and execute git checkout. For example, to set Ansible version stable-2.3 run:

git checkout stable-2.3

Then, perform the compilation followed by the Ansible installation:

make
make install

Step 3. Confirm the Ansible Installation.

Once the installation is complete, verify the Ansible version to ensure it was installed correctly:

ansible --version

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Ansible. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Ansible in Debian 9 Stretch systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Ansible website.