Ansible uses Secure Shell (SSH) and WinRM to manage its host clients. All installation happens on either the management node or the master node, or possibly on multiple nodes when redundancy is needed. We will proceed into the installation of Ansible from source, as with Python PyPI on two major Linux families: Debian (which includes Debian, Linux Mint, Kali Linux, Ubuntu, and Ubuntu Mate) and Red Hat (which includes Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, and Scientific Linux). We will also be looking at the Ansible installation process for Mac OS X, Python PyPI, and how to install it from the source. We will cover cloud usage and containerized Ansible.

If you have a choice, we recommend using the default package manager for Red Hat, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, and Mac OS X. Using the package manager allows the installation of the latest stable version...

The Ansible configuration is mainly stored in the ansible.cfg configuration file, which is usually located in /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg in most system package managers and the Python PyPI installation. It may also be located in the home directory of the user who installed Ansible, or whichever location the ANSIBLE_CONFIG environment variable is pointing to. In this section, we will be covering the most useful configuration that can be altered using Ansible to make your life easier.

Open your ansible.cfg file using your favorite text editor, either in CLI mode (using vi or nano) or with a GUI (using Gedit or Atom):

sudo nano /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg

Many would...

The only important tool that is required to be installed and running on the client machine is  the OpenSSH-server. All new releases of Linux use SSH as the main remote access method by default.

To make sure that everything is in place, the SSH service should always be running and the system's firewall should allow a port for SSH to service through. By default, this is port 22. This can be changed, however, and this change should be also noted in the host Ansible inventory.

For Linux clients, any extra configuration for Ansible management is more aimed at following best practice guidelines than being strictly necessary. Extra configuration can be a way to make sure that the remote clients managed by Ansible are fully automated, securely accessible, and do not require an admin intervention when running automated tasks.

As well as Linux hosts, Ansible is capable of remotely managing Microsoft Windows hosts. This includes Windows Desktop 7, 8, and 10, and Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2, and 2016.

The Windows clients require you to have some specific versions of the following applications installed:

• PowerShell 3.0 or higher
• .NET 4.0

Those two requirements are met on most Windows releases, except for Window 7 and Windows server 2008.

There is an Ansible-made PowerShell script that can carry out an automatic installation of the missing requirements that can be found at the following link: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Ansible-QuickStart-Guide/blob/master/Chapter2/Upgrade_Powershell.ps1.

To be able to execute this script, or any other third-party script, we need to change the execution policy from restricted to unrestricted, run our script...

In this chapter, we looked at how to prepare the environment for multiple systems in order to be able to install Ansible. We also considered which configuration options were most useful in either Linux or Windows. Now that we've learned how to set up and configure Ansible, we're ready to start learning about its functional features. In the following chapter, we will be covering Ansible playbooks and inventory to better understand how orchestration works.

• Ansible documentation: https://docs.ansible.com/