Install Ansible on Mac OSX

Ansible uses Python and fortunately Python is already installed on modern versions of OSX.

Quick summary:

Install Xcode
sudo easy_install pip
sudo pip install ansible --quiet

Then, if you would like to update Ansible later, just do:

sudo pip install ansible --upgrade

Full explanation...

Ensure Xcode is installed first

Some of Ansible's dependencies need to be compiled, so you'll need the developer tools that come with Xcode.

You can check if you already have the developer tools by running this:

> pkgutil --pkg-info=com.apple.pkg.CLTools_Executables

(note: Before OSX Mavericks, the package to check for was "com.apple.pkg.DeveloperToolsCLI")

If the tools are not installed, you will see this output:

> pkgutil --pkg-info=com.apple.pkg.CLTools_Executables
No receipt for 'com.apple.pkg.CLTools_Executables' found at '/'.

In that case, download and install Xcode from here.

If the tools are installed, you should see output similar to this:

> pkgutil --pkg-info=com.apple.pkg.CLTools_Executables
package-id: com.apple.pkg.CLTools_Executables
version: 5.1.0.0.1.1396320587
volume: /
location: /
install-time: 1397415256
groups: com.apple.FindSystemFiles.pkg-group com.apple.DevToolsBoth.pkg-group com.apple.DevToolsNonRelocatableShared.pkg-group

Install pip

pip is Python's package manager. It isn't installed on OSX by default, but you can use Python's other package manager easy_install to install it:

> sudo easy_install pip
Password:
Searching for pip
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/pip/
Best match: pip 1.4.1
Downloading https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/p/pip/pip-1.4.1.tar.gz#md5=6afbb46aeb48abac658d4df742bff714
Processing pip-1.4.1.tar.gz
Running pip-1.4.1/setup.py -q bdist_egg --dist-dir /tmp/easy_install-hVr8Pt/pip-1.4.1/egg-dist-tmp-BY70iY
warning: no files found matching '*.html' under directory 'docs'
warning: no previously-included files matching '*.rst' found under directory 'docs/_build'
no previously-included directories found matching 'docs/_build/_sources'
Adding pip 1.4.1 to easy-install.pth file
Installing pip script to /usr/local/bin
Installing pip-2.7 script to /usr/local/bin
Installed /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/pip-1.4.1-py2.7.egg
Processing dependencies for pip
Finished processing dependencies for pip

Install Ansible

> sudo pip install ansible
...lots of output and warnings you can ignore...
Successfully installed ansible paramiko jinja2 PyYAML pycrypto ecdsa markupsafe
Cleaning up...

Upgrade Ansible

When a new release of Ansible comes out, you can easily upgrade to the new version like this:

> sudo pip install ansible --upgrade

Post-Install Setup

Next, see the post-install steps...

Ansible: Post-Install Setup

Inventory hosts file

After you've installed Ansible, then you'll want Ansible to know which servers to connect to and manage.

Ansible's inventory hosts file is used to list and group your servers. Its default location is /etc/ansible/hosts.

If you want to have your Ansible hosts file in another location, then you can set this environment variable:

> export ANSIBLE_HOSTS=/root/ansible_hosts

Or you can specify the Ansible hosts location when running commands with the --inventory-file= (or -i) flag:

> ansible all --inventory-file=/root/ansible_hosts -m ping

For more on the inventory hosts file, see: http://docs.ansible.com/intro_inventory.html

Set up connectivity to the servers

For this example, I'll assume you have servers with the hostnames child1.dev and child2.dev. When doing your own install, replace those hostnames with your own.

Your /etc/ansible/hosts file would look like this:

child1.dev
child2.dev

You want to be able to connect to your servers without having to enter a password every time. If you don't already have ssh key authentication set up to your children nodes, then do the following...

Generate the ssh key on the master node:

root@master:~# ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "name@example.org"

Then copy your public key to the servers with ssh-copy-id:

root@master:~# ssh-copy-id user@child1.dev
root@master:~# ssh-copy-id user@child2.dev

Now you can test the connectivity:

root@master:~# ansible all -m ping
child1.dev | success >> {
    "changed": false, 
    "ping": "pong"
}

child2.dev | success >> {
    "changed": false, 
    "ping": "pong"
}

Next...

Now you're ready to actually manage your servers with Ansible's playbooks: http://docs.ansible.com/playbooks_intro.html