Installing and Running Ansible

Welcome to this, our first chapter in the second edition of Learn Ansible. In this chapter, we will look at a few topics to introduce you to Ansible; these topics will familiarize you with the basics of what Ansible is and give you a few different use cases.

By the end of the chapter, you will have gotten hands-on with Ansible and covered the following:

• Who is behind Ansible?
• The differences between Ansible and other tools
• The problem Ansible solves
• How to install Ansible on macOS and Linux
• Running Ansible on Windows 11 using the Windows Subsystem for Linux
• Launching a test virtual machine
• An introduction to playbooks

Before we start talking about Ansible, let’s quickly discuss my background, how I came to be writing a book about Ansible, and what you will need to install and run Ansible on your system.