Ansible Installation Guide on RHEL/CentOS 8

There are different methods using which you can install ansible

• Using default package manager such as yum, dnf, apt etc
• Using pip
• Using source compile file

Install using package manager on RHEL 8

First register your system to RHSM:

~]# subscription-manager register

Attach your Red Hat Ansible Engine subscription. This command will help you find the Red Hat Ansible Engine subscription:

~]# subscription-manager list --available

Grab the pool id of the subscription and run the following:

~]# subscription-manager attach --pool=<pool id>

Enable the Red Hat Ansible Engine Repository:

~]# subscription-manager repos --enable ansible-VERSION-for-rhel-8-x86_64-rpms

To subscribe to ansible 2.9 repository:

~]# subscription-manager repos --enable ansible-2.9-for-rhel-8-x86_64-rpms

Install Ansible Engine using default package manager:

~]# dnf -y install ansible

Install using package manager on CentOS 8

If you are on CentOS 8 then you will need access to respective EPEL repository

[root@server ~]# dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm -y

This will install and enable EPEL repository

~]~]# dnf repolist
repo id                         repo name
AppStream                       CentOS-8 - AppStream
BaseOS                          CentOS-8 - Base
epel                            Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 8 - x86_64
epel-modular                    Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux Modular 8 - x86_64
extras                          CentOS-8 – Extras

Search for the ansible package in the available repository.

~]# dnf search ansible
Last metadata expiration check: 1 day, 21:16:38 ago on Thu 17 Sep 2020 01:25:51 PM IST.
===================================== Name Exactly Matched: ansible =====================================
ansible.noarch : SSH-based configuration management, deployment, and task execution system

Install ansible using the default package manager

~]# dnf install -y ansible

Check the version of ansible

[root@controller ~]# ansible --version
ansible 2.9.13
  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 = /bin/ansible
  python version = 3.6.8 (default, Apr 16 2020, 01:36:27) [GCC 8.3.1 20191121 (Red Hat 8.3.1-5)]

Install using pip

Ansible can be installed with pip, the Python package manager. If pip isn’t already available on your system of Python, run the following commands to install it:

~]# dnf -y install python3 python3-pip

Check the version of pip3

~]# pip3 --version
pip 9.0.3 from /usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages (python 3.6)

Login as a normal user as root user cannot be used to install ansible with pip. Next as normal user initiate the installation process:

[deepak@centos8-2 ~]$ pip3 install ansible --user 
Collecting ansible
  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/32/62/eec759cd8ac89a866df1aba91abf785 486fed7774188a41f42f5c7326dcb/ansible-2.9.13.tar.gz (14.3MB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 14.3MB 36kB/s
Collecting jinja2 (from ansible)
  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/30/9e/f663a2aa66a09d838042ae1a2c5659828bb9b41ea3a6efa20a20fd92b121/Jinja2-2.11.2-py2.py3-none-any.whl (125kB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 133kB 1.1MB/s

<output trimmed>

Installing collected packages: MarkupSafe, jinja2, ansible
  Running setup.py install for ansible ... done
Successfully installed MarkupSafe-1.1.1 ansible-2.9.13 jinja2-2.11.2

Check the ansible version

 ~]$ ansible --version
ansible 2.9.13
  config file = None
  configured module search path = ['/home/deepak/.ansible/plugins/modules', '/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
  ansible python module location = /home/deepak/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/ansible
  executable location = /home/deepak/.local/bin/ansible
  python version = 3.6.8 (default, Nov 21 2019, 19:31:34) [GCC 8.3.1 20190507 (Red Hat 8.3.1-4)]

What's Next

Next in our Ansible Tutorial we will configure Ansible in our lab environment