How to install ansible on windows

Introduction

Ansible is an Infrastructure as Code tool used for managing and monitoring remote servers.

Ansible requires a Linux-based system to run. This can be a problem if you want to use its features on a Windows 10 system. However, there are ways to install Ansible on Windows.

This tutorial will cover different ways you can install Ansible on Windows 10.

Prerequisites

• A system running Windows 10
• A user account with administrator privileges

There are three ways to run Ansible on Windows 10:

• Cygwin
• Linux Virtual Machine
• Enabling Ubuntu on Windows 10

We shall explain all three methods of installing Ansible on Windows.

Method 1: Using Cygwin

Cygwin is a POSIX-compatible environment that lets you run tools and code designed for Unix-like operating systems on Microsoft Windows.

Even though the default Cygwin installation contains hundreds of tools for Unix-based systems, Ansible is not one of them. You must manually add Ansible during the installation process.

To install Ansible on Windows using Cygwin, follow these steps:

1. Download the Cygwin installation file. This file is compatible with both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 10. It automatically installs the right version for your system.

2. Run the Cygwin installation file. On the starting screen of the installation wizard, click Next to continue.

3. Select Install from Internet as the download source and click Next.

4. In the Root Directory field, specify where you want the application installed, then click Next.

5. In the Local Package Directory field, select where you want to install your Cygwin packages, then click Next.

6. Choose the appropriate Internet connection option.

If you aren’t using a proxy, select Direct Connection.

If you are using a proxy, select Use System Proxy Settings or enter the proxy settings manually with the Use HTTP/FTP Proxy.

Click Next to continue.

7. Choose one of the available mirrors to download the installation files, then click Next.

8. On the Select Packages screen, change the View option to Full and type ‘ansible’ in the search bar.

Select both Ansible and Ansible Doc by checking the boxes under Src? and click Next to continue.

9. This screen lets you review the installation settings. To confirm and begin the install process, click on Next.

10. The install wizard will download and install all the selected packages, including Ansible.

11. Once the installation is complete, select whether you want to add a Cygwin desktop and Start Menu icon, then click on Finish to close the wizard.

Method 2: Using a Linux Virtual Machine

Another way to install Ansible on Windows 10 is to use a virtualization tool and a Linux virtual box.

In this example, we will use Oracle VM VirtualBox to set up an Ubuntu virtual machine and install Ansible.

Step 1: Setting Up VirtualBox

1. Download the VirtualBox installation file.

2. Run the VirtualBox installation file.

On the starting screen of the installation wizard, click Next to continue.

3. Use this screen to select which features of VirtualBox you want to install. This is also where you can set the install location. Click Next to continue.

4. Choose whether you want to add Desktop, Start Menu, and Quick Launch Bar shortcuts and add file associations. Click Next to continue.

5. A new screen will warn you that the install wizard needs to reset your network connection. Click Yes to continue.

6. On the next screen, click Install to begin the installation process.

7. The install wizard might prompt you to add a VirtualBox USB device. Click Yes to continue.

8. Click Finish to complete the installation.

Step 2: Creating an Ubuntu 20.04 Virtual Box

1. Download the Ubuntu 20.04 desktop image.

2. On the VirtualBox starting screen, click New.

3. Type in the name of your virtual machine. If the name contains the word ‘Ubuntu’, the operating system dropdown menu will automatically update to Ubuntu (64-bit). If not, you can select the operating system manually using the dropdown menu. Click Next to continue.

4. Set the amount of RAM you want the virtual machine to have.

Click Next to continue.

5. Select a hard disk option for your virtual machine.

Choose Create a virtual hard disk now if you are creating a brand new VM. Click Create to continue.

6. Choose the type of virtual hard disk you want to create. Click Next.

7. Choose if the new virtual hard disk has a fixed amount of space or if you want it to allocate space dynamically. Select Fixed size and click Next.

8. Select the location of the virtual hard disk on your computer and enter the size limit.

For this example, we will set the size limit to 10GB. Click Create to continue.

9. Select the new virtual machine you just created on the left-hand side of the VirtualBox starting screen. Click Start to run the new VM.

10. VirtualBox will prompt you to select a start-up disk. Click on the button next to the drop-down menu to open the optical Disk Selector.

11. In the Optical Disk Selector, click Add.

12. Find the Ubuntu 20.04 desktop image you downloaded in a previous step. Select the image and click Open.

13. In the Optical Disk Selector, highlight the image you just added and click Choose.

14. Click Start to begin the install process for Ubuntu 20.04.

Step 3: Installing Ansible

1. Once you are done installing Ubuntu 20.04, open the command terminal.

2. In the command terminal, enter the following command:

$ sudo apt update

This command refreshes the system’s package index and allows you to Install Ansible.

3. To install Ansible, use the command:

$ sudo apt install ansible -y

The rest of the install process is automated.

After you install it on you virtual machine, you can configure Ansible by setting up the hosts inventory file and checking the connections.

Method 3: Enabling Ubuntu on Windows 10

The third option is to use the Windows Subsystem for Linux to start up the Ubuntu terminal without setting up a virtual machine:

1. Open the Start menu and search for Turn Windows features on or off. Click on the shortcut when it appears.

2. Scroll down through the list of features until you see Windows Subsystem for Linux. Click on the checkbox, and then click OK to enable the feature.

3. Open the Microsoft Store. Search for Ubuntu and click on Get to install the latest version.

4. Once the installation is complete, click on Launch to start up the Ubuntu command terminal.

5. To install Ansible, enter the following set of commands:

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

Conclusion

If you followed the steps in this guide, you now have a copy of Ansible installed on your Windows 10 system.

Now you can use Ansible to manage and configure remote servers, and plan your CI/CD process.

Love Ansible, but wondering how to get it running on Windows?

Ansible is one of the most popular configuration administration and infrastructure automation tools. It helps to automate infrastructure configuration/provisioning, software deployments, and general infrastructure management.

Ansible was initially available on Linux. However, with Microsoft’s new viewpoint on open source, their community improvements, and their acceptance of a more agile, DevOps-minded software development method, Windows support is gradually catching up with the pace.

Although Windows support requires a slight bit more configuration, it’s not very bad once the initial setup is done. There are two possible ways to get it installed.

Using Cygwin

Have you heard of Cygwin?

It is a POSIX-compatible environment to run on Windows. This means – you can run many things on Windows, which you usually do on UNIX-based OS.

If its the first time you heard about Cygwin then I would refer to their official website to get more understanding.

The default Cygwin installation doesn’t cover Ansible. Hence, you got to select them during installation, as explained below manually.

• Download Cygwin (Chose 32 bit or 64 bit Cygwin package as per your system)

• Run the Cygwin installation file which you downloaded above and follow the screen.

• Select download source as “Install from Internet.”

• Set a root directory where you would like your application installed

• Select a directory where you would like to install your Cygwin packages

• Select Direct connection if you’re not using a proxy.

• Select a mirror to download your packages. You can choose any from the list.

• Packages available for installation will be shown; this is where we have to select ansible – select view as Full explicitly and then search for “ansible” and then select the latest version as shown below.
• Ansible-doc is optional, click next

• Review and confirm changes by clicking next

• It will download and install the necessary packages.

• Once done, you will get a success message, click Finish

Congratulation! You have installed Cygwin with Ansible on Windows. Let’s verify it.

• Double click on Cygwin Terminal icon from the desktop and type ansible --version

And, as you can see, it has successfully installed.

Go ahead and play around with it. If you are interested in learning Ansible, then check out this Udemy course.

Using Ubuntu on Windows 10

Thanks to Microsoft. Now it is possible to install Ubuntu on Windows 10.

Let’s get it started.

• Search for Windows features in the search box. And when the “Turn Windows features on or off ” appears, click on that.

• A window will open with a bunch of features. Scroll down and check the box of Windows Subsystem for the Linux option. And after that, click on the OK button.

• Open the Microsoft Store and search for Ubuntu to install the latest version.

• After the installation, you will see a launch button, use that to open the Ubuntu bash.
• On Ubuntu bash, it will ask you to set the username and password for the default user. You can also set the root account password from here by typing sudo passwd root

• Its time to get the Ansible installed with the following commands.

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

• Press Y when it asks for…

After the installation, let’s test whether by creating and running a demo playbook.

• Create a file called testbook.yml

nano testbook.yml

• Add the following lines and save the file

- name: testing ansible 
hosts: localhost 
tasks: 
- name: echo a message 
debug: msg=”this is working"

And, finally, run the playbook.

ansible playbook testbook.yml --connection=local

Conclusion

I hope this helps you to install Ansible on Windows. Check out this blog post to learn about the playbook to automate the tasks.

Even though Ansible is known for managing Linux nodes using SSH, did you know that Ansible on Windows works just as well? Using Windows Remote Management (WinRM), Ansible on Windows can effectively manage all of your Windows nodes too!

Not a reader? Watch this related video tutorial!

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With Ansible on Windows, you can perform tasks like deploying patches, managing Windows servers, execute PowerShell scripts, and more.

In this tutorial, you’re going to learn how to set up your first Windows node to be managed with Ansible and see how to run commands and playbooks against it.

Prerequisites

If you’d like to follow along with the tutorial, please be sure you have the following before starting:

• An Ansible controller host – This tutorial will be using Ansible v2.9.18 on an Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS machine with an IP address of 10.111.4.53. Note that Windows is not supported as a control node, only a managed node.
• Python installed on your Ansible controller host – This tutorial will be using Python v2, but v3 should work just as well.
• The pip package installed on the Ansible controller.
• A Windows 2012 R2 or greater computer for Ansible to manage – This tutorial will use two Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard machines as remote nodes with IP addresses of 52.242.251.213 and 10.111.4.106.
• A Windows workstation – This tutorial will perform some basic pre-configuration to the node that Windows will manage with Ansible and will require you to sitting at a Windows workstation.
• The Windows server to manage has PowerShell Remoting enabled
• A user account in the local Administrators group on the Windows computer. This tutorial will use an account called adminuser.

Setting up the WinRM listener on Windows

Before Ansible can communicate with a remote Windows node, it must be able to make a connection to it. It does this through the Microsoft protocol WinRM. WinRM is the same protocol that PowerShell Remoting uses to run remote commands from within PowerShell.

As of this writing, Ansible does support SSH as a management protocol, but it’s an experimental feature at this time.

For Ansible to use WinRM to communicate with the Windows node, you must configure WinRM. To do this, Ansible provides a PowerShell script that sets various WinRm options.

Although the PowerShell script that Red Hat provides to configure WinRM has been tested and is safe, you should read through it and understand, at a high level, what it’s doing.

Your first task will be to download the configuration script and run Ansible on the Windows node. To do that, assuming you already have PowerShell Remoting enabled on your target Windows computer and you’re at a Windows workstation:

Download the ConfigureRemotingForAnsible.ps1 PowerShell script to your local Windows computer. This tutorial will assume it’s saved in ~Downloads.

Run the configuration script on the Windows node Ansible will manage using the Invoke-Command command. The command below will run the command on the tutorial’s two demo machines and prompt you for the password for the local adminuser account on the Windows nodes.

Invoke-Command -ComputerName 52.242.251.213, 10.111.4.106 -FilePath '~DownloadsConfigureRemotingForAnsible.ps1' -Credential (Get-Credential -UserName adminuser)

By default, the configuration script will configure WinRM for basic HTTP authentication. If you’d like Ansible to use a more secure connection, learn How to Configure WinRM over HTTPS for Ansible.

Configuring the Controller of Ansible on Windows

Now that the Windows node is ready for Ansible, let’s now configure the Ansible controller to show Ansible how to communicate with it.

1. Connect to your Ansible controller host via SSH using your favorite SSH client.

2. Install the pywinrm Python module. The pywinrm Python module is required for Ansible on Windows to communicate to hosts via the WinRM protocol.

3. Define the remote Windows nodes in an Ansible inventory file. An Ansible inventory is a collection of remote hosts defined in a file either by their hostname or IP address. Once defined, you can then target Ansible inventories with commands and playbooks, as you’ll soon see.

The default Ansible inventory file is located in the /etc/ansible/hosts directory.

The sample inventory file below is created a windows host group that contains each Windows node. The tutorial is using a host group here to make it easier to target all Windows nodes (if you have more than one) at once later.

[windows]
 54.242.251.213
 10.111.4.106

4. Next, define a few required variables Ansible will use when connecting to the Windows hosts in the inventory file as a windows:vars group.

[windows:vars]
 ansible_user=localadmin ## the windows username for ansible to communicate
 ansible_password=s3crect ## the windows password for ansible to communicate
 ansible_connection=winrm ## The kind of connection which ansible will make with remote windows node
 ansible_winrm_server_cert_validation=ignore ## ignore certificate validation because we'll just be using a self-signed certificate that comes with Ansible

5. Now, use the Ansible win_ping module to execute a simple connection test to the hosts inside of the windows host group defined in step #3.

# windows is the host group
# -m tells Ansible to use the win_ping module
 ansible windows -m win_ping

Once executed, you can see below that Ansible returns green text with a SUCCESS message indicating the successful ping attempt.

The output confirms that the Ansible controller host can communicate with the Windows remote host successfully over WinRM.

At this point, you’re all set for Ansible to begin controlling your Windows nodes. Let’s now test this out by running an ad-hoc command on the Windows nodes to change them. Ad-hoc commands are great when you need to run a simple command on nodes without first creating a playbook.

Let’s demonstrate ad-hoc commands by installing a Windows feature on the Windows nodes defined in the windows host group in the inventory file. To do that, assuming you’re still SSHed into your Ansible controller node:

1. Instead of the win_ping module this time, call the win_feature module (-m), passing it two arguments (-a) of name and state indicating the name of the Windows feature and the state you desire it to be in.

# windows here is a group of hosts
# win_feature is the name of the module
# state=present means to install the package or service
 ansible windows -m win_feature -a "name=Telnet-Client state=present"

When you run the above command, if all goes well, Ansible should connect to all of the nodes in the windows host group and run the win_feature command on each checking for, and if not present, installing the Telnet-Client Windows feature.

2. Ansible shows success, but to be sure, connect to the Windows nodes manually with PowerShell and verify the Telnet Client Windows feature is now installed. On your local Windows workstation, run Invoke-Command to run the Get-WindowsFeature PowerShell command on each Windows computer.

Invoke-Command -ComputerName 52.242.251.213, 10.111.4.106 -ScriptBlock { Get-WindowsFeature -Name 'Telnet-Service' } -Credential (Get-Credential -UserName adminuser)

At this point, you can run any Windows module you like as ad-hoc commands!

Creating and Running Ansible on Windows Playbooks

Once you’ve mastered the art of running ad-hoc commands on Windows managed nodes, your next task is to create and run playbooks.. An Ansible playbook combines commands into a single place and allows you to write complex logic to perform complex automation scenarios.

Running Remote Windows Commands with the win_command Module

Assuming you’re still connected to your Ansible controller host:

1. Create a folder under your home directory called ansible-windows-demo and change to it. This folder will hold your playbook.

mkdir ~/ansible-windows-demo 
cd ~/ansible-windows-demo 

2. Open your favorite text editor and create and save a file called ansible-windows.yml in the ~/ansible-windows-demo directory.

Ansible playbooks are written in YAML

3. Now, copy the below playbook into the ansible-windows.yml file to create a single task. This playbook will execute the netstat Windows command using the win_command Windows Ansible module on all hosts inside the windows host group.

The win_command module executes commands on windows remote host. It doesn’t allow commands which include variables such as special characters, line breaker, greater than symbol, etc.

---
 - name: Ansible win_command module example  
   hosts: windows # host group to run the module on       
   tasks: 
   -  name: run an executable command on a remote Windows system
      win_command: netstat -e # win_command is a Windows module. 

4. Invoke the ansible-windows.yml playbook, which executes the task on the remote host by running the following command.

ansible-playbook ansible-windows.yml

If all went well, you should see output like below.

Running Remote PowerShell Commands with the win_shell Module

You created a playbook to run a remote cmd.exe command (netstat) on Windows managed nodes in the previous example. Let’s now up the ante a bit and run PowerShell commands using the win_shell module.

By default win_shell module runs on PowerShell on windows host

On your local Windows workstation:

1. First, open your favorite text editor on your local Windows workstation and create a sample PowerShell script and copy the following code into it, saving it as one.ps1. This tutorial will save the script to ~one.ps1.

The below code creates a blank text file called test2.txt in the C:temp directory.

Set-Content -Path C:temptest2.txt -Value ''

2. Copy the one.ps1 PowerShell script to your Windows managed nodes using your preferred method. This tutorial will assume you’ve copied the one.ps1 script to the C:Temp folder on each Windows node.

3. Once the sample PowerShell script is one the Windows node(s), connect to your Ansible controller host and open your favorite text editor again. This time, create and save another playbook called ansible-windows-shell.yml in the same ~/ansible-windows-demo directory.

4. Copy and paste the following playbook into the ansible-windows-shell.yml file. This playbook will run two tasks to demonstrate the win_shell module. It invokes the PowerShell script just copied from step #2 and inserts the PowerShell code directly into the playbook to demonstrate the script isn’t needed at all.

To pass multiple lines of PowerShell code to the win_shell module, use the | pipe character.

---
 - name: Ansible win_shell module example 
   remote_user: localadmin # local Windows user to connect with
   hosts: windows # remote host group
   tasks:
    - name: Single line PowerShell # Running single command using win_shell module
      win_shell: C:tempone.ps1
    - name: Run multi-lined shell commands 
      win_shell: |
        $text = ' Iam Author of ATA'
       Set-Content -Path C:temptest3.txt -Value $text 

5. Now, invoke the second playbook ansible-windows-shell.yml, which executes on the remote host but with PowerShell.

ansible-playbook ansible-windows-shell.yml

6. If necessary, on your local Windows workstation, verify the playbook executed the existing script and the PowerShell code in the playbook.

Invoke-Command -ComputerName 52.242.251.213, 10.111.4.106 -ScriptBlock { Test-Path -Path 'C:Temptest3.txt','C:Temptest2.txt' } -Credential (Get-Credential -UserName adminuser)

If the Ansible playbook ran successfully, PowerShell should return two True statements indicating that the files now exist.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you’ve learned how to set up your first Windows managed node in Ansible. Even though Ansible has traditionally been known as a Linux tool, it can easily be used for Windows also!

What playbooks and Windows modules will you start using to manage Windows with Ansible?

Know simple way to configure Ansible on Windows 10 using Windows subsystems for Linux such as Debian, Open Suse or Ubuntu. 

Ansible is an open source software available for Linux Based systems such as Debian, Redhat, Ubuntu, Centos and more…  Besides the free product, it also comes in an enterprise version called Ansible Tower. It was acquired by RedHat (2015) and written in Python. It is basically powerful and simple to setup tool that uses for making the automation process. It can help in configuration management, application deployment, and task automation.

This tool is capable of handling complex operations without the need of some agent on the remote machine. It can connect remotely via SSH or Powershell.

Ansible is very much able to handle multiple tasks simultaneously. For example, the user can upgrade some remote server while simultaneously detaching that from any cluster.  Means many complex tasks can be done from a single point on the screen. It also has an extensible architecture which allows users to use Ansible modules to add extra functionality into it. They are mostly standalone and written in language like Python, Perl, Ruby, Bash, etcetera. So, now let’s see how to install the Ansible on Windows 10 without any virtual machine or virtualization software like VirtualBox.

• Open the Window’s Turn Windows features on or off section.
• Select the Windows Subsystem for Linux to activate it.
• Go to the Microsoft app store.
• Search for Linux.
• Multiple Linux system will appear like Debian, Ubuntu, OpenSuse
• Select the Ubuntu or any other  Linux you want to install the Ansible. Here we are using Ubuntu 18.04
• Once the Ubuntu installed on Windows 10, it will ask you to create the user.
• Now add the Ansible PPA repo on Windows 10’s Ubuntu app.
• Use installation commands to install the Ansible on Windows 10 Linux subsystem.
• Now you can run Ansible on Windows to perform different management and automation tasks.

Tutorial in Detail with screenshots:

Step 1: Turn Windows features on or off 

Basically, this features already on the Windows 10 and we just need to turn it on from the features option. For that just search for Windows features in the Search box. And when the “Turn Windows features on or off ” appears click on that.

Step 2: Install the Windows SubSystem for Linux

Now a window will open with a bunch of features. Scroll down and check the box of Windows Subsystem for Linux option. And after that click on the OK button.

Step 3: Open the Microsoft Store 

To open the App store of Microsoft for Windows click on the search box and type Microsoft store. The moment it will appear, click on that.

Step 4: Install Ubuntu 18.04 on Windows 10

Now search for the Ubuntu and install the latest version which is 18.04. As soon as it appears, you will see GET button, click on that and install it on your Windows 10. After the installation, you will see a launch button, use that to open the Ubuntu Bash. You can install any other Linux system such as Debian, Kali Linux, and OpenSuSE to install the Ansible.

Step 5: Set the credentials 

When the Ubuntu Bash opens, it will ask you to set the username and password for default user of your Ubuntu on Windows. We can also set the root account password from here. Just type sudo passwd root

Step 6: Install Ansible on Windows

For installing and running Ansible on Windows just use the below-given commands:

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

Note: For older Ubuntu versions such as Ubuntu 14.04, 15.04, and 16.04, we need to add the repo of Ansible but the latest version such as Ubuntu 18.04 can get the Ansible installation files directly from via its package management.

Press Y when it asks for…

Step 7: Test Ansible on Windows

After the installation of Ansible, we will test it whether it is working or not. So, we create a demo playbook file for it.

Create a file called testbook.yml

nano testbook.yml

Now add the following lines into it and then exit and save the file.

- name: testing ansible
hosts: localhost


tasks:
- name: echo a message
debug: msg="this is working"

Step 8: Now run the ansible command to check whether it is working or not.

The command is:

ansible playbook testbook.yml --connection=local

Note: We are pointing the ansible to localhost because we want to test the file present on localhost.

It will prompt a message the mentioned host file is empty. So, in the next, we will also give it some demo inventory file.

Step 9: Create a demo inventory for Ansible

Create a file with any name you want, we are using ‘inventory’. So, the command is:

nano inventory

Now add the following lines into it… Here we are adding some random non-existing demo domains in a group of localhost in the file for testing purpose.

[testing]
localhost
test.domain.tld
test.domain.tld

Step 10: Run the Ansible command with inventory

This time again we run the same command above but with inventory file available

ansible playbook -i inventory testbook.yml --connection=local

This time you will see that it will not be going to show any error.

So, in this way, we can install the Ansible on Windows 10 for testing and other purposes.

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Ever since I heard about the new ‘Beta’ Windows Subsystem for Linux, which basically installs an Ubuntu LTS release inside of Windows 10 (currently 14.04), I’ve been meaning to give it a spin, and see if it can be a worthy replacement for Cygwin, Git shell, Cmder, etc. And what I was most interested in was whether I could finally point people to a more stable and friendly way of using Ansible on a Windows workstation.

In the past, there was the option of running Ansible inside Cygwin (and this is still the best way to try getting Ansible working in an older Windows environment), but this always felt kludgy to me, and I hated having to recommend either that or forcing Windows users to do a full Linux VM installation just to run Ansible commands. I finally updated my PC laptop to the latest Windows 10 Anniversary Update, and installed the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and lo and behold, Ansible works!

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to install and use Ansible on Windows 10.

Installing Bash on Windows 10

For reference, here are the official instructions from Microsoft: Bash on Ubuntu on Windows — Installation Guide.

Before installing the Linux Subsystem, you have to have:

• Windows 10 (Anniversary update or later version)
• 64-bit installation (can’t run on 32-bit systems)

Once you verify your system is 64-bit and up to date, you have to do a few manual steps to enable the ‘Windows Subsystem for Linux’:

1. Open ‘Settings’ (the cog in the start menu)
2. Click ‘Update & Security’, then click the ‘For developers’ option on the left.
3. Toggle the ‘Developer mode’ option, and accept any warnings Windows pops up.

Wait a minute for Windows to install a few things in the background (it will eventually let you know a restart may be required for changes to take effect—ignore that for now). Next, to install the actual Linux Subsystem, you have to jump over to ‘Control Panel’ (why is this separate from ‘Settings’?), and do the following:

1. Click on ‘Programs’
2. Click on ‘Turn Windows features on or off’
3. Scroll down and check ‘Windows Subsystem for Linux (Beta)’, and then click OK.

The subsystem will be installed, then Windows will require a reboot. Reboot, then open up the start menu and enter ‘bash’ (to open up ‘Bash’ installation in a new command prompt). Fill out all the questions (it will have you create a separate user account for the Linux subsystem), and once that’s all done (it takes a few minutes to install), you will finally have Ubuntu running on your Windows laptop, somewhat integrated with Windows.

Installing Ansible

To install Ansible, since we’re basically in an Ubuntu environment, it’s as simple as installing pip, then installing Ansible:

1. Open a bash prompt (from start menu, type ‘bash’ and hit enter).
2. Install Pip: sudo apt-get -y install python-pip python-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev
3. Install Ansible: pip install ansible --user (--user installs packages local to the user account instead of globally to avoid permissions issues with Pip and the Linux Subsystem)
4. Since the ansible* commands are installed under ~/.local/bin, we need to add that to the $PATH, so run the command: echo 'PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc
5. Either exit out of the bash prompt and start it again from the Windows menu, or run source .bashrc to update your $PATH to include Ansible.

Note the use of --user for the pip install command; due to some peculiarities of the way the Linux subsystem works, Pip can’t easily install packages globally, so we install packages just for the user account we set up for bash.

Using Ansible

At this point, which ansible should show the path to Ansible, ansible --version should show you Ansible’s version, and you should be able to use ansible and the rest of the command-line tools (e.g. ansible-playbook, ansible-galaxy, etc.) as you would on any common environment.

If you get the error message ImportError: No module named markupsafe, try installing markupsafe manually with pip install markupsafe --user. See this GitHub issue for more detail.

If you want to run a playbook that’s stored in your Windows user account’s Documents folder (e.g. C:UsersjgeerlingDocuments), you can do so by navigating to /mnt/c/Users/jgeerling/Documents (where jgeerling is your username). Windows drives are mounted in the Subsystem inside the /mnt directory. Let’s create a test playbook and see if it works!

1. Open a bash prompt, and cd into your Windows user’s Documents directory: cd /mnt/c/Users/jgeerling/Documents.
2. Create a new test playbook: touch test.yml

3. User nano or some other editor to add the following contents:

     ---
     - hosts: localhost
       tasks:
         - debug: msg="Ansible is working!"
   

4. Run the playbook with the command ansible-playbook test.yml --connection=local

Ansible should run the command and print out the debug message. Ansible might warn about no inventory file being present, but since you’re using --connection=local, the localhost host should automatically work.

Going further

Now that you have Ansible installed, you can start automating everything (even including the rest of the bash environment)! If you need to, you can generate an SSH key for use connecting to servers, use ssh to directly connect to servers, etc. It’s basically a full Ubuntu LTS install running inside Windows!

In this post we will get started with Ansible by:

1. Setup of the control machine
2. Configure Windows server in order to receive commands from Ansible
3. Install Chocolatey and SQL Server

Ansible requires PowerShell version 3.0 and .NET Framework 4.0 or newer to function on older operating systems like Server 2008 and Windows 7.

If you covered the requirements, let’s get started with the first step.

Setup Ansible control machine

As previously mentioned Ansible is agentless, but we need control machine — machine which talks to all of our hosts.

Ansible can’t run on Windows but there’s a trick

Currently Ansible can only be installed on Unix based machines, but if you are using Windows as your primary OS, you can install Ubuntu subsystem. Read this for further installation details. If you are non Windows user please continue reading.

Install Ansible

After the installation of Ubuntu subsystem on Windows (if you had so), lets proceed with the installation of Ansible by opening terminal.

Install Ubuntu repository management:
$ sudo apt-get install software-properties-common

Lets update our system:
$ sudo apt-get update

Add Ansible repository:
$ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible

Then install Ansible:
$ apt-get install ansible

Add Python package manager:
$ apt install python-pip

Add Python WinRM client:
$ pip install pywinrm

Install XML parser:
$ pip install xmltodict

If every thing went OK you should be able to get the current version:
$ ansible --version

So far, so good. Lets continue with configuration of the tool.

Configure Ansible

Inventory — list of the hosts

Inventory.yml is the main configuration file of your hosts addresses separated in groups with descriptive names.

Let’s create that file and set the example below:
$ vim inventory.yml

Enter the IP/DNS addresses for your group:

[dbservers]
mydbserver1.dns.example 80.69.0.160

[webservers]
mywebserver1.dns.example 80.69.0.162

Configure the connection

We are a few steps away from establish connection to the remote servers. Let’s configure the connection itself — credentials, ports, type of connection. The convention is to name the config file based on your group of hosts.

If you want all of your inventory to use that same configuration file you can name it all.yml. We will use all.yml as all servers will have same credentials and connection type.

Let’s begin by creating folder:
$ mkdir group_vars

Create the file and edit it:
$ vim group_vars/all.yml

Add the configuration details:

ansible_user: ansible_user
ansible_password: your_password_here
ansible_port: 5985
ansible_connection: winrm
ansible_winrm_transport: basic
ansible_winrm_operation_timeout_sec: 60
ansible_winrm_read_timeout_sec: 70

This credentials will be used to access the remote hosts with connection set to WinRM basic authentication. We will create them in the next section.
We use basic authentication but for your production environment you probably want to use more secure schema. See this article for more info.

Configure Windows hosts

Our Windows hosts need to be configured before execute any commands on it. The following PowerShell script will do:

1. Create the Ansible user we defined in all.yml
2. Add the user to the Administrators group
3. Set WinRM authentication to basic and allow unencrypted connections
4. Add Firewall rule for WinRM with your control machine IP address

Open PowerShell on the host and execute the script:

NET USER ansible_user "your_password_here" /ADD
NET LOCALGROUP "Administrators" "ansible_user" /ADD
Set-Item -Path WSMan:localhostServiceAuthBasic -Value $true
Set-Item -Path WSMan:localhostServiceAllowUnencrypted -Value $true
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="WinRM" dir=in action=allow protocol=TCP localport=5985 remoteip=10.10.1.2

After the execution is completed we can try to ping our host from the control machine to check that connection is OK. We ping only the DB servers:
$ ansible dbservers -i inventory.yml -m win_ping

Write our first playbook

Getting back to our Ansible control machine to add a playbook — set of tasks or plays which together form the playbook.

The target is to install Chocolatey which is the community driven package manager for Windows. After that we will install SQL Server and reboot the server.

Ansible come with many modules for Windows with a lot of functionalities out of the box. They are prefixed with “win_” like for example win_feature. You can check more here for your specific needs.

Let’s continue with the creation of the playbook file:
$ vim configure-win-server-playbook.yml

In the file describe the playbook as follows:

--------
- hosts: dbservers
  tasks:
   - name: Install Chocolatey
     raw: Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

   - name: Install SQL Server
     win_chocolatey:
     name: sql-server-2017
     state: present

   - name: Reboot to apply changes
     win_reboot:
      reboot_timeout: 3600

Execute the playbook by typing:
$ ansible-playbook dbservers -i inventory.yml configure-win-server-playbook.yml

You will see each task running and returning status of execution and after reboot we are all ready!

Conclusion

Ansible is really powerful tool. Microsoft and the community is doing really fantastic work for porting Ansible modules to Windows which are written in PowerShell. Yet the plan to have SSH feature on Windows is great too. No matter if your inventory is of physical or virtual servers, you should definitely try out Ansible on your infrastructure for saving time, money and of course avoid human mistakes by manually configure, deploy or provision those environments.