How To Install Ansible on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ansible on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. 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 Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver).
• 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 Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Installing Ansible on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

• Method 1. Install Ansible from the PPA repository.

sudo apt install software-properties-common
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible
sudo apt update
sudo apt install ansible

Check installation was successful by using this command:

ansible --version

• Method 2. Install Ansible from the Ubuntu repository.

sudo apt install ansible

When successful, check your installed Ansible version:

$ ansible --version
ansible 2.3.1.0
config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
configured module search path = Default w/o overrides
python version = 2.7.14+ (default, Feb 6 2018, 19:12:18) [GCC 7.3.0]

• Method 3. Install Ansible from Source.

Execute the following Linux command to perform the installation of all prerequisites:

sudo apt install make git make python-setuptools gcc python-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev python-packaging

Next, download the Ansible source code using the git:

git clone git://github.com/ansible/ansible.git
cd ansible
git checkout stable-2.5

Then, perform the compilation followed by the Ansible installation:

make
make install

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Ansible. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Ansible on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) server. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Ansible website.