How to Install Ansible on Ubuntu, RHEL, macOS & CentOS

Ansible is a powerful tool for configuration management, task automation, security/compliance tasks, orchestration, cloud provisioning, and application deployment. It follows a master-slave architecture with an Ansible control node triggering and managing jobs (playbooks) on managed nodes. Ansible uses SSH to establish connectivity to the managed nodes and YAML files for outlining provisioning specifics. Ansible can be installed across various Operating Systems such as Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS, MacOS, and Windows. It only needs Python and a few support libraries on each machine (control node and managed nodes). Ansible uses a declarative language, YAML, and focuses on keeping everything idempotent to ensure that nothing changes when the same playbook is run multiple times. To install Ansible on different Operating Systems, you can use pip or package managers like APT for Ubuntu, DNF for RHEL, YUM for CentOS, and Homebrew for MacOS. For Windows, you can use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Docker, or a virtual machine to manage Windows as a managed node. To test Ansible's connectivity and command execution capabilities over SSH, you can perform a connectivity test using the ping module on Linux/Unix nodes or the win_ping module on Windows nodes. If successful, this indicates that your managed nodes are correctly configured and ready for Ansible to run playbooks and tasks against them.