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Installing Ansible
This page describes how to install Ansible on different platforms. Ansible is an agentless
automation tool that by default manages machines over the SSH protocol. Once installed,
Ansible does not add a database, and there will be no daemons to start or keep running. You
only need to install it on one machine (which could easily be a laptop) and it can manage an
entire eet of remote machines from that central point. When Ansible manages remote
machines, it does not leave software installed or running on them, so there’s no real question
about how to upgrade Ansible when moving to a new version.

Prerequisites
Control node requirements
Managed node requirements
Selecting an Ansible version to install
Installing Ansible on RHEL, CentOS, or Fedora
Installing Ansible on Ubuntu
Installing Ansible on Debian
Installing Ansible on Gentoo with portage
Installing Ansible on FreeBSD
Installing Ansible on macOS
Installing Ansible on Solaris
Installing Ansible on Arch Linux
Installing Ansible on Slackware Linux
Installing Ansible on Clear Linux
Installing Ansible with pip
Running Ansible from source (devel)
Finding tarballs of tagged releases
Ansible command shell completion
Installing argcomplete on RHEL, CentOS, or Fedora
Installing argcomplete with apt
Installing argcomplete with pip
Con guring argcomplete
Globally
Per command
argcomplete with zsh or tcsh
Ansible on GitHub

Prerequisites
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You install Ansible on a control node, which then uses SSH (by default) to communicate with
your managed nodes (those end devices you want to automate).

Control node requirements

Currently Ansible can be run from any machine with Python 2 (version 2.7) or Python 3
(versions 3.5 and higher) installed. This includes Red Hat, Debian, CentOS, macOS, any of the
BSDs, and so on. Windows is not supported for the control node.

When choosing a control node, bear in mind that any management system bene ts from being
run near the machines being managed. If you are running Ansible in a cloud, consider running it
from a machine inside that cloud. In most cases this will work better than on the open Internet.

 Note

macOS by default is con gured for a small number of le handles, so if you want to use 15
or more forks you’ll need to raise the ulimit with
sudo launchctl limit maxfiles unlimited . This command can also x any “Too many open
les” error.

 Warning

Please note that some modules and plugins have additional requirements. For modules
these need to be satis ed on the ‘target’ machine (the managed node) and should be listed
in the module speci c docs.

Managed node requirements

On the managed nodes, you need a way to communicate, which is normally SSH. By default
this uses SFTP. If that’s not available, you can switch to SCP in ansible.cfg
(../reference_appendices/con g.html#ansible-con guration-settings). You also need Python 2
(version 2.6 or later) or Python 3 (version 3.5 or later).

 Note

If you have SELinux enabled on remote nodes, you will also want to install libselinux-
python on them before using any copy/ le/template related functions in Ansible. You
can use the yum module (../modules/yum_module.html#yum-module) or dnf module
(../modules/dnf_module.html#dnf-module) in Ansible to install this package on remote
systems that do not have it.
By default, Ansible uses the Python interpreter located at /usr/bin/python to run its
modules. However, some Linux distributions may only have a Python 3 interpreter
installed to /usr/bin/python3 by default. On those systems, you may see an error like:

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 "module_stdout": "/bin/sh: /usr/bin/python: No such file or directory\r\n"

you can either set the ansible_python_interpreter

(../user_guide/intro_inventory.html#ansible-python-interpreter) inventory variable (see
How to build your inventory (../user_guide/intro_inventory.html#inventory)) to point at
your interpreter or you can install a Python 2 interpreter for modules to use. You will
still need to set ansible_python_interpreter
(../user_guide/intro_inventory.html#ansible-python-interpreter) if the Python 2
interpreter is not installed to /usr/bin/python.
Ansible’s raw module (../modules/raw_module.html#raw-module), and the script
module (../modules/script_module.html#script-module), do not depend on a client side
install of Python to run. Technically, you can use Ansible to install a compatible version
of Python using the raw module (../modules/raw_module.html#raw-module), which
then allows you to use everything else. For example, if you need to bootstrap Python 2
onto a RHEL-based system, you can install it as follows:

$ ansible myhost --become -m raw -a "yum install -y python2"

Selecting an Ansible version to install

Which Ansible version to install is based on your particular needs. You can choose any of the
following ways to install Ansible:

Install the latest release with your OS package manager (for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
(TM), CentOS, Fedora, Debian, or Ubuntu).
Install with pip (the Python package manager).
Install from source to access the development ( devel ) version to develop or test the latest
features.

 Note

You should only run Ansible from devel if you are actively developing content for Ansible.
This is a rapidly changing source of code and can become unstable at any point.

Ansible creates new releases two to three times a year. Due to this short release cycle, minor
bugs will generally be xed in the next release versus maintaining backports on the stable
branch. Major bugs will still have maintenance releases when needed, though these are
infrequent.

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Installing Ansible on RHEL, CentOS, or Fedora
On Fedora:

$ sudo dnf install ansible

On RHEL and CentOS:

$ sudo yum install ansible

RPMs for RHEL 7 and RHEL 8 are available from the Ansible Engine repository
(https://access.redhat.com/articles/3174981).

To enable the Ansible Engine repository for RHEL 8, run the following command:

$ sudo subscription-manager repos --enable ansible-2.9-for-rhel-8-x86_64-rpms

To enable the Ansible Engine repository for RHEL 7, run the following command:

$ sudo subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-ansible-2.9-rpms

RPMs for currently supported versions of RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora are available from EPEL
(https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL) as well as releases.ansible.com
(https://releases.ansible.com/ansible/rpm).

Ansible version 2.4 and later can manage earlier operating systems that contain Python 2.6 or
higher.

You can also build an RPM yourself. From the root of a checkout or tarball, use the make rpm
command to build an RPM you can distribute and install.

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

$ cd ./ansible
$ make rpm
$ sudo rpm -Uvh ./rpm-build/ansible-*.noarch.rpm

Installing Ansible on Ubuntu

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Ubuntu builds are available in a PPA here
(https://launchpad.net/~ansible/+archive/ubuntu/ansible).

To con gure the PPA on your machine and install Ansible run these commands:

$ sudo apt update

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

 Note

On older Ubuntu distributions, “software-properties-common” is called “python-software-

properties”. You may want to use apt-get instead of apt in older versions. Also, be aware
that only newer distributions (i.e. 18.04, 18.10, etc.) have a -u or --update ag, so adjust
your script accordingly.

Debian/Ubuntu packages can also be built from the source checkout, run:

$ make deb

You may also wish to run from source to get the development branch, which is covered below.

Installing Ansible on Debian

Debian users may leverage the same source as the Ubuntu PPA.

Add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ansible/ansible/ubuntu trusty main

Then run these commands:

$ sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 93C4A3FD7BB9C367

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install ansible

 Note

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 This method has been veri ed with the Trusty sources in Debian Jessie and Stretch but
may not be supported in earlier versions. You may want to use apt-get instead of apt in
older versions.

Installing Ansible on Gentoo with portage

$ emerge -av app-admin/ansible

To install the newest version, you may need to unmask the Ansible package prior to emerging:

$ echo 'app-admin/ansible' >> /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords

Installing Ansible on FreeBSD

Though Ansible works with both Python 2 and 3 versions, FreeBSD has different packages for
each Python version. So to install you can use:

$ sudo pkg install py27-ansible

or:

$ sudo pkg install py36-ansible

You may also wish to install from ports, run:

$ sudo make -C /usr/ports/sysutils/ansible install

You can also choose a speci c version, i.e ansible25 .

Older versions of FreeBSD worked with something like this (substitute for your choice of
package manager):

$ sudo pkg install ansible

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Installing Ansible on macOS
The preferred way to install Ansible on a Mac is with pip .

The instructions can be found in Installing Ansible with pip. If you are running macOS version
10.12 or older, then you should upgrade to the latest pip to connect to the Python Package
Index securely.

Installing Ansible on Solaris

Ansible is available for Solaris as SysV package from OpenCSW
(https://www.opencsw.org/packages/ansible/).

# pkgadd -d http://get.opencsw.org/now
# /opt/csw/bin/pkgutil -i ansible

Installing Ansible on Arch Linux

Ansible is available in the Community repository:

$ pacman -S ansible

The AUR has a PKGBUILD for pulling directly from GitHub called ansible-git
(https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ansible-git).

Also see the Ansible (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ansible) page on the ArchWiki.

Installing Ansible on Slackware Linux

Ansible build script is available in the SlackBuilds.org (https://slackbuilds.org/apps/ansible/)
repository. Can be built and installed using sbopkg (https://sbopkg.org/).

Create queue with Ansible and all dependencies:

# sqg -p ansible

Build and install packages from a created queue le (answer Q for question if sbopkg should
use queue or package):

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 # sbopkg -k -i ansible

Installing Ansible on Clear Linux

Ansible and its dependencies are available as part of the sysadmin host management bundle:

$ sudo swupd bundle-add sysadmin-hostmgmt

Update of the software will be managed by the swupd tool:

$ sudo swupd update

Installing Ansible with 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:

$ curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py

$ python get-pip.py --user

Then install Ansible [1]:

$ pip install --user ansible

Or if you are looking for the development version:

$ pip install --user git+https://github.com/ansible/ansible.git@devel

If you are installing on macOS Mavericks (10.9), you may encounter some noise from your
compiler. A workaround is to do the following:

$ CFLAGS=-Qunused-arguments CPPFLAGS=-Qunused-arguments pip install --user ansible

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In order to use the paramiko connection plugin or modules that require paramiko , install the
required module [2]:

$ pip install --user paramiko

Ansible can also be installed inside a new or existing virtualenv :

$ python -m virtualenv ansible # Create a virtualenv if one does not already exist
$ source ansible/bin/activate # Activate the virtual environment
$ pip install ansible

If you wish to install Ansible globally, run the following commands:

$ sudo python get-pip.py

$ sudo pip install ansible

 Note

Running pip with sudo will make global changes to the system. Since pip does not
coordinate with system package managers, it could make changes to your system that
leaves it in an inconsistent or non-functioning state. This is particularly true for macOS.
Installing with --user is recommended unless you understand fully the implications of
modifying global les on the system.

 Note

Older versions of pip default to http://pypi.python.org/simple

(http://pypi.python.org/simple), which no longer works. Please make sure you have the
latest version of pip before installing Ansible. If you have an older version of pip
installed, you can upgrade by following pip’s upgrade instructions
(https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/installing/#upgrading-pip) .

Running Ansible from source (devel)

 Note

You should only run Ansible from devel if you are actively developing content for Ansible.
This is a rapidly changing source of code and can become unstable at any point.

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Ansible is easy to run from source. You do not need root permissions to use it and there is no
software to actually install. No daemons or database setup are required.

 Note

If you want to use Ansible Tower as the control node, do not use a source installation of
Ansible. Please use an OS package manager (like apt or yum ) or pip to install a stable
version.

To install from source, clone the Ansible git repository:

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

$ cd ./ansible

Once git has cloned the Ansible repository, setup the Ansible environment:

Using Bash:

$ source ./hacking/env-setup

Using Fish:

$ source ./hacking/env-setup.fish

If you want to suppress spurious warnings/errors, use:

$ source ./hacking/env-setup -q

If you don’t have pip installed in your version of Python, install it:

$ curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py

$ python get-pip.py --user

Ansible also uses the following Python modules that need to be installed [1]:

$ pip install --user -r ./requirements.txt

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To update Ansible checkouts, use pull-with-rebase so any local changes are replayed.

$ git pull --rebase

$ git pull --rebase #same as above

$ git submodule update --init --recursive

Once running the env-setup script you’ll be running from checkout and the default inventory
le will be /etc/ansible/hosts . You can optionally specify an inventory le (see How to build
your inventory (../user_guide/intro_inventory.html#inventory)) other than
/etc/ansible/hosts :

$ echo "127.0.0.1" > ~/ansible_hosts

$ export ANSIBLE_INVENTORY=~/ansible_hosts

You can read more about the inventory le at How to build your inventory
(../user_guide/intro_inventory.html#inventory).

Now let’s test things with a ping command:

$ ansible all -m ping --ask-pass

You can also use “sudo make install”.

Finding tarballs of tagged releases

Packaging Ansible or wanting to build a local package yourself, but don’t want to do a git
checkout? Tarballs of releases are available on the Ansible downloads
(https://releases.ansible.com/ansible) page.

These releases are also tagged in the git repository

(https://github.com/ansible/ansible/releases) with the release version.

Ansible command shell completion

As of Ansible 2.9, shell completion of the Ansible command line utilities is available and
provided through an optional dependency called argcomplete . argcomplete supports bash,
and has limited support for zsh and tcsh.
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You can install python-argcomplete from EPEL on Red Hat Enterprise based distributions, and
or from the standard OS repositories for many other distributions.

For more information about installing and con guration see the argcomplete documentation
(https://argcomplete.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).

Installing argcomplete on RHEL, CentOS, or Fedora

On Fedora:

$ sudo dnf install python-argcomplete

On RHEL and CentOS:

$ sudo yum install epel-release

$ sudo yum install python-argcomplete

Installing argcomplete with apt

$ sudo apt install python-argcomplete

Installing argcomplete with pip

$ pip install argcomplete

Con guring argcomplete

There are 2 ways to con gure argcomplete to allow shell completion of the Ansible command
line utilities: globally or per command.

Globally

Global completion requires bash 4.2.

$ sudo activate-global-python-argcomplete

This will write a bash completion le to a global location. Use --dest to change the location.
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Per command

If you do not have bash 4.2, you must register each script independently.

$ eval $(register-python-argcomplete ansible)

$ eval $(register-python-argcomplete ansible-config)
$ eval $(register-python-argcomplete ansible-console)
$ eval $(register-python-argcomplete ansible-doc)
$ eval $(register-python-argcomplete ansible-galaxy)
$ eval $(register-python-argcomplete ansible-inventory)
$ eval $(register-python-argcomplete ansible-playbook)
$ eval $(register-python-argcomplete ansible-pull)
$ eval $(register-python-argcomplete ansible-vault)

You should place the above commands into your shells pro le le such as ~/.profile or
~/.bash_profile .

argcomplete with zsh or tcsh

See the argcomplete documentation (https://argcomplete.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).

Ansible on GitHub
You may also wish to follow the GitHub project (https://github.com/ansible/ansible) if you have
a GitHub account. This is also where we keep the issue tracker for sharing bugs and feature
ideas.

 See also

Introduction to ad-hoc commands (../user_guide/intro_adhoc.html#intro-adhoc)

Examples of basic commands

Working With Playbooks (../user_guide/playbooks.html#working-with-playbooks)

Learning ansible’s con guration management language

How do I handle the package dependencies required by Ansible package dependencies

during Ansible installation ? (../reference_appendices/faq.html#installation-faqs)

Ansible Installation related to FAQs

Mailing List (https://groups.google.com/group/ansible-project)

Questions? Help? Ideas? Stop by the list on Google Groups

irc.freenode.net (http://irc.freenode.net)

#ansible IRC chat channel

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[1] (1, 2) If you have issues with the “pycrypto” package install on macOS, then you may
need to try CC=clang sudo -E pip install pycrypto .

[2] paramiko was included in Ansible’s requirements.txt prior to 2.8.

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