How to install Ansible on Windows, Mac, and Linux?

What is Ansible?

Ansible is an open source software provisioning, Configuration Management (CM), and application deployment tool. It runs on many Unix-like systems, and can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Windows. It includes its own declarative language to describe system configuration.

Prerequisites for Ansible

To use Ansible, you need to have Python and Pip installed in your operating system. Both Python and Pip are essential for installing and running Ansible via the command line.

1. How to install Python on Linux?
2. How to install Pip on Linux?

Install Ansible

This knowledge base article gives simple, step-by-step instructions for installing Ansible. Ansible is a command-line tool used to connect to remote machines to execute CM and deployment automation. For ease of use and consistency, it is recommended to install Ansible using Pip, the Python package manager, on Windows, Mac, or Linux operating systems. After completing the installation, it’s essential to verify the version of Ansible to ensure the installation was successful. For additional guidance, you can refer to the Ansible documentation.

Windows

You cannot run the Ansible control machine directly on Windows due to limitations in low-level APIs. However, you can bypass this restriction by installing Ansible within Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Linux VM, or Linux container.

Mac and Linux

You can use the following commands to install Ansible on a Mac or Linux operating system.

# Install Ansible.
$ sudo pip install ansible==9.1.0

# Check Ansible version.
$ ansible --version