How to Install Ansible on CentOS 7 via Yum

Ansible is an automation engine, similar to Chef or Puppet, that can be used to ensure deployment and configuration consistency across many servers, and keep servers and applications up-to-date. Though, unlike some other tools, Ansible does not require a client component/agent.

• These instructions are intended specifically for installing Ansible, an automation tool.
• I’ll be working from a Liquid Web Core Managed CentOS 7 server, and I’ll be logged in as non-root user. If you need more information then visit our tutorial on How to Add a User and Grant Root Privileges on CentOS 7.

Ansible is part of Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL), which is a community repository of non-standard packages for the RHEL distribution. First, we’ll install the EPEL repository:

sudo rpm -iUvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/e/epel-release-7-5.noarch.rpm

As a matter of best practice we’ll update our packages:

sudo yum -y update

Then let’s install Ansible and any required packages:

sudo yum -y install ansible

Check the version of Ansible that is installed:

ansible --version

Which should yield something similar to:

ansible 1.8.4
configured module search path = None