Lab 1: Installing Ansible in a Virtualenv

Overview

F5 Recommends installing ansible on a python virtual environment (virtualenv). This is also a recommended way to use ansible within the ansible opensource community.

virtualenv creates isolated Python environments to avoid problems caused by conflicting dependencies and differing versions. virtualenv works by simply creating a folder which contains all of the necessary executables and dependencies for a specific version of Python.

Objective

  • Understand how to install python-virtualenv in Debian/Ubuntu Linux
  • Create a virtual environment in which to run Ansible

Lab Requirements

  • SSH or Terminal access to the Ubuntu Jumpbox/Ansible Host

Estimated completion time: 5 minutes

TASK 1 ‑ Install the python-virtualenv package

  1. Open an SSH session or Terminal window to the Ubuntu host

Hint

Log in to the jumphost with username: f5student and password: f5DEMOs4u#

  1. Run the following command to install the python-virtualenv package:
$ sudo apt install python-virtualenv

Note

You will be prompted for a password. Use the same password you used to log into the jumphost (f5DEMOs4u#)

Note

In the lab environment, this package is already installed. Unless there has been a new version released since the lab was built, you should receive a message that the package is already at the newest version.

TASK 2 - Create the virtual environment

  1. Run the following command to create the new virutal environment:
$ virtualenv myansible
  1. Run the following command to begin working in the virtual environment:
$ source myansible/bin/activate

Note

Take a look at your command prompt: You’ll see that it now shows the name of the active virtual environment. Any future python commands that change your environment (e.g.: instaling a package with pip install) will take effect within this environment, and won’t affect the system as a whole.

image1

Task 3: Installing Ansible

pip is a package manager for Python. We will be using it to install the Ansible packages into our virtual environment

  1. Run the following command to install Ansible via pip:
$ pip install ansible

Note

Keep an eye on the console output. You can see that all of the dependencies for Ansible are installed for you automatically.

  1. Check the installed version of Ansible with the following command:
$ ansible --version

image2

Note

Keep your SSH or terminal session open for the next lab.