Ansible Installation on Debian 9 Stretch Linux from Source

Objective

The following guide describes simple to follow steps on how to install the latest version of the open-source automation engine Ansible.

Operating System and Software Versions

Operating System: – Debian Stretch 9

Requirements

Privileged access to you Debian Linux system will be required.

Difficulty

EASY

Conventions

# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command
$ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user

Instructions

Prerequisites

To start with, we need to install required prerequisites. Execute the following linux command to perform the installation of all prerequisites:

# apt update
# apt install make git make python-setuptools gcc python-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev python-packaging

Download Ansible source code

Download Ansible source code using git command:

$ git clone git://github.com/ansible/ansible.git

Navigate to ansible directory:

$ cd ansible

Select Ansible Version

This step is optional as it only allows you to select a desired Ansible version to be installed on your system. The following linux command will list all available Ansible stable versions:

$  git branch -a | grep stable
  remotes/origin/stable-1.9
  remotes/origin/stable-2.0
  remotes/origin/stable-2.0-network
  remotes/origin/stable-2.0.0.1
  remotes/origin/stable-2.1
  remotes/origin/stable-2.2
  remotes/origin/stable-2.3

Take a note of you desired version and execute git checkout. For example to set Ansible version stable-2.2 run:

$ git checkout stable-2.2