Install Ansible on CentOS 5.8 / 6.4, Fedora 17 / 19

One of the great things about Ansible is that you don't need to install an Ansible client on the servers you're managing. You only need to install Ansible on your local machine or on a master server that can connect to the managed servers via SSH.

The official installation documentation is at: http://docs.ansible.com/intro_installation.html#latest-release-via-yum

CentOS 5.8

Not recommended. There are a lot of issues with running Ansible from 5.8 since it uses Python 2.4 by default. There are ways to make it work, but it's better to just use CentOS 6.4 or another OS if you can.

CentOS 5.8 still works fine for the managed servers though if you install python-simplejson on them first.

CentOS 6.4

> rpm -Uvh http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
> yum install ansible -y

Fedora 17 /19

> yum install ansible -y

Note: These instructions were tested on DigitalOcean's CentOS 5.8 / 6.4 and Fedora 17 / 19 server images (all x64) in August 2013. If you discover an error with these instructions, please email: [email protected].

Post-Install Setup

Next, see the post-install steps...