Ansible version and configuration

It is assumed that you have Ansible installed on your system. There are many documents out there that cover installing Ansible in a way that is appropriate for the operating system and version that you might be using. This book will assume the use of the Ansible 1.9.x version. To discover the version in use on a system with Ansible already installed, make use of the version argument, that is, either ansible or ansible-playbook:

Note

Note that ansible is the executable for doing ad-hoc one-task executions and ansible-playbook is the executable that will process playbooks for orchestrating many tasks.

The configuration for Ansible can exist in a few different locations, where the first file found will be used. The search order changed slightly in version 1.5, with the new order being:

• ANSIBLE_CFG: This is an environment variable
• ansible.cfg: This is in the current directory
• ansible.cfg: This is in the user's home directory
• /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg

Some installation methods may include placing a config file in one of these locations. Look around to check whether such a file exists and see what settings are in the file to get an idea of how Ansible operation may be affected. This book will assume no settings in the ansible.cfg file that would affect the default operation of Ansible.