Textbook of Linux

← Software

Ansible

An agentless configuration management and orchestration tool.

Ansible runs declarative playbooks (YAML) against remote machines over SSH, with no agent to install on the target. Modules cover package installation, file management, service control, cloud provisioning, networking gear, Windows administration, and many other domains. The agentless design has been a defining feature: to bring a host under management you need only SSH access and a working Python interpreter, and to remove a host from management you just stop running the playbook.

Michael DeHaan released Ansible in 2012 after stints at Red Hat and Puppet Labs, with explicit ergonomic goals — pleasant YAML, no agent, low onboarding cost — that distinguished it from the existing CFEngine-Puppet-Chef trio. Red Hat acquired the project and Ansible's commercial company in 2015, integrated it into their automation product line, and have continued open-source development ever since.

Ansible ships with thousands of modules across dozens of "collections" curated by Red Hat and the community. It is widely used both for traditional configuration management on long-lived servers and for ad-hoc orchestration tasks (rolling restarts, day-zero patching, cluster reconfiguration). The Ansible Automation Platform extends the open-source engine with a web UI, scheduling, RBAC, and analytics.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install ansible
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install ansible
Arch:          sudo pacman -S ansible
macOS:         brew install ansible
Or via pip:    pip install ansible