Ansible works primarily over the SSH protocol, which is supported natively by most every server, workstation, and operating system on the planet, with one exception—Microsoft’s venerable Windows OS (though this may change in the coming years).
To use SSH on Windows, you need additional software. But Ansible also requires other utilities and subsystems only present on Linux or other UNIX-like operating systems. This poses a problem for many system administrators who are either forced to use or have chosen to use Windows as their primary OS.
This appendix will guide Windows users through the author’s preferred method of using Ansible on a Windows workstation.
If you are running Windows 10, and have upgraded to the latest version, you can install the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which is the most seamless Linux integration you can currently get in Windows.
The WSL downloads a Linux distribution and places it in a special privileged VM layer that’s as transparent as it can be while sandboxed from the general Windows environment. Using WSL, you can open up a Linux prompt and have access to almost all the same software and functionality you would have if you were running Linux natively!
Microsoft has the most up-to-date installation guide on their Developer Network site, but the installation process is straightforward:
At this point, the WSL is installed, but you haven’t installed a Linux environment. To install Linux, follow Microsoft’s guide to download and install a Linux distribution. For our purposes, I recommend the latest Ubuntu LTS release.
Once installation completes, there will be a shortcut either on your Desktop or in the Start menu, and you can either use this shortcut to open a Terminal session, or you can type bash in a Command prompt.
Now that you have Linux running inside Windows, you can install Ansible inside the WSL environment just like you would if you were running Linux natively!
Before installing Ansible, make sure your package list is up to date by updating apt-get:
The easiest way to install Ansible is to use pip3, a package manager for Python. Python should already be installed on the system, but pip3 may not be, so let’s install it, along with Python’s development header files (which are in the python3-dev package).
After the installation is complete, install Ansible:
After Ansible and all its dependencies are downloaded and installed, make sure Ansible is running and working:
You can now use Ansible within the Ubuntu Bash environment. You can access files on the Windows filesystem inside the /mnt folder (/mnt/c corresponds to C:\), but be careful when moving things between Windows and the WSL, as strange things can happen because of line ending, permissions, and filesystem differences!
If you’re running Windows 7 or 8, or for some reason can’t install or use the Windows Subsystem for Linux in Windows 10 or later, then the best alternative is to build a local Virtual Machine (VM) and install and use Ansible inside.
The easiest way to build a VM is to download and install Vagrant and VirtualBox (both 100% free!), and then use Vagrant to install Linux, and PuTTY to connect and use Ansible. Here are the links to download these applications:
Once you’ve installed all three applications, you can use either the command prompt (cmd), Windows PowerShell, or a Linux terminal emulator like Cygwin to boot up a basic Linux VM with Vagrant (if you use Cygwin, which is not covered here, you could install its SSH component and use it for SSH, and avoid using PuTTY).
Open PowerShell (open the Start Menu or go to the Windows home and type in ‘PowerShell’), and change directory to a place where you will store some metadata about the virtual machine you’re about to boot. I like having a ‘VMs’ folder in my home directory to contain all my virtual machines:
Now, use vagrant to create the scaffolding for our new virtual machine:
Vagrant creates a ‘Vagrantfile’ describing a basic Ubuntu 64-bit virtual machine in the current directory, and is now ready for you to run vagrant up to download and build the machine. Run vagrant up, and wait for the box to be downloaded and installed:
After a few minutes, the box will be downloaded and a new virtual machine set up inside VirtualBox. Vagrant will boot and configure the machine according to the defaults defined in the Vagrantfile. Once the VM is booted and you’re back at the command prompt, it’s time to log into the VM.
Use vagrant ssh-config to grab the SSH connection details, which you will then enter into PuTTY to connect to the VM.
It should show something like:
The lines we’re interested in are the Hostname, User, Port, and IdentityFile.
Launch PuTTY, and enter the connection details:
Click Open to connect, and if you receive a Security Alert concerning the server’s host key, click ‘Yes’ to tell PuTTY to trust the host. You can save the connection details by entering a name in the ‘Saved Sessions’ field and clicking ‘Save’ to save the details.
PuTTY will ask for login credentials; we’ll use the default login for a Vagrant box (vagrant for both the username and password):
You should now be connected to the virtual machine, and see the message of the day:
If you see this prompt, you’re logged in, and you can start administering the VM. The next (and final) step is to install Ansible.
Before installing Ansible, make sure your package list is up to date by updating apt-get:
The easiest way to install Ansible is to use pip3, a package manager for Python. Python should already be installed on the system, but pip3 may not be, so let’s install it, along with Python’s development header files (which are in the python-dev package).
After the installation is complete, install Ansible:
After Ansible and all its dependencies are downloaded and installed, make sure Ansible is running and working:
You should now have Ansible installed within a virtual machine running on your Windows workstation. You can control the virtual machine with Vagrant (cd to the location of the Vagrantfile), using up to boot or wake the VM, halt to shut down the VM, or suspend to sleep the VM. Log into the VM manually using PuTTY or via vagrant ssh with Cygwin or Git’s Windows shell.
Use Ansible from within the virtual machine just as you would on a Linux or Mac workstation directly. If you need to share files between your Windows environment and the VM, Vagrant conveniently maps /vagrant on the VM to the same folder where your Vagrantfile is located. You can also connect between the two via other methods (SSH, SMB, SFTP etc.) if you so desire.
There are ways to ‘hack’ Ansible into running natively within Windows (without a Linux VM), but I recommend either using the WSL or running everything within a Linux VM as performance will be better and the number of environment-related problems you encounter will be greatly reduced!