How to Install Ansible on CentOS 7 via Yum

Posted on March 16, 2015 by J. Mays

Category: Technical Support | Tags: Ansible, Automation, CentOS, CentOS 7, Chef, Puppet

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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.

Pre-Flight Check

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.

Step #1: Add the EPEL Repository

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

Step #2: The Installation

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

Step #3: Verify The Installation

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

About the Author: J. Mays

As a previous contributor, JMays shares his insight with our Knowledge Base center. In our Knowledge Base, you'll be able to find how-to articles on Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora and much more!