Oracle Linux - Install Ansible

Ansible is an open-source automation engine that automates software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment. Ansible is based upon a push mechanism where you will push configurations to the servers rather than pulling them as is done by, for example, puppet. When you want to start using Ansible the first step required will be configuring that central location from where you will push the Ansible configurations.  Installing Ansible on a Oracle Linux machine is rather straight forward and can be achieved by following the below steps.

Step 1
To be able to install Ansible via the YUM command you will have to ensure that you have the EPEL release RPM installed which will take care of ensuring that you have the fedora YUM repository in place. This is due to the fact that the RPM's for ansible are placed on the fedora repository.

You can do so by first executing a wget to download the file and than install it with the RPM command:

wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm


rpm -ivh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm 

If done correct you will now have something like the below in your YUM repository directory:

[root@localhost ~]# ls -la /etc/yum.repos.d/
total 24
drwxr-xr-x.  2 root root 4096 Aug 25 09:22 .
drwxr-xr-x. 63 root root 4096 Aug 25 08:36 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  957 Nov  5  2012 epel.repo
-rw-r--r--   1 root root 1056 Nov  5  2012 epel-testing.repo
-rw-r--r--.  1 root root 7533 Mar 28 10:13 public-yum-ol6.repo
[root@localhost ~]# 

if you check the epel.repo file you should have at least the "Extra packages for Enterprise Linux 6" channel active. You can see this in the example below:

[root@localhost ~]# cat /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo 
[epel]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - $basearch
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/$basearch
mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-6&arch=$basearch
failovermethod=priority
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-6

[epel-debuginfo]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - $basearch - Debug
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/$basearch/debug
mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-debug-6&arch=$basearch
failovermethod=priority
enabled=0
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-6
gpgcheck=1

[epel-source]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - $basearch - Source
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/SRPMS
mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-source-6&arch=$basearch
failovermethod=priority
enabled=0
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-6
gpgcheck=1
[root@localhost ~]# 

Steps 2
As soon as you have completed the needed steps in step 1 you should be able to do an installation of Ansible on Oracle Linux by executing a simple yum install command.

yum install ansible

Step 3
In basic your installation should be done and Ansible should be available and ready to be configured. To ensure you have the installation right you can conduct the below test to verify.

[root@localhost init.d]#  ansible localhost -m ping
 [WARNING]: provided hosts list is empty, only localhost is available

localhost | SUCCESS => {
    "changed": false, 
    "ping": "pong"
}
[root@localhost init.d]#