Managed node requirements

So far, we have focused almost exclusively on the requirements for the Ansible control host and have assumed that (except for the distribution of the SSH keys) the target hosts will just work. This, of course, is not always the case, and for example, while a modern installation of Linux installed from an ISO will often just work, cloud operating system images are often stripped down to keep them small, and so might lack important packages such as Python, without which Ansible cannot operate.

If your target hosts are lacking Python, it is usually easy to install it through your operating system’s package management system. Ansible requires you to install either Python version 2.7 or 3.5 (and above) on the Ansible-managed nodes but has more stringent requirements for the control node. At the time of writing, ansible-core 2.15 (which accompanies Ansible 8.0.0) requires a version of Python between 3.9 and 3.11 to be installed on the control node. This...