[Workaround] Running Ansible on Windows

Introduction

Maybe you saw my previous post where I configured a Zabbix server with Ansible. Since Ansible is not supported on any Windows platform I was using a VM with CentOS on it. This quickly became a struggle to constantly change from Windows to CentOS and vice versa. So I did some research and came across Cygwin. With this program it is possible to run Ansible but it's not officialy supported. But I don't have any issues at this moment on Windows 8.1 Pro.

How do we install Ansible?

Ofcourse the first thing we need to do is install Cygwin. Click here to download (32bit - 64bit). Open the setup and select the following programs to install:

• curl
• git
• vim
• openssh
• openssh-devel
• python (2.7.x)
• python-crypto
• python-ssl
• python-setuptools
• make
• gcc-core

Once the setup is completed fire up Cygwin. The program is called "Cygwin Terminal", you should get the following screen.

Now you can follow this series of commands:

	# Download extra packages
	curl -O https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/P/PyYAML/PyYAML-3.11.tar.gz
	curl -O https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/J/Jinja2/Jinja2-2.7.3.tar.gz
	curl -O http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/sshpass/sshpass/1.05/sshpass-1.05.tar.gz
	# Unpack them
	tar -xvf PyYAML-3.11.tar.gz
	tar -xvf Jinja2-2.7.3.tar.gz
	tar -xvf sshpass-1.05.tar.gz
	# Install everything
	cd /home/$USERNAME/Jinja2-2.7.3/
	python setup.py install
	cd /home/$USERNAME/PyYAML-3.11/
	python setup.py install
	cd /home/$USERNAME/sshpass-1.05/
	./configure
	make install
	# Install Ansible
	git clone https://github.com/ansible/ansible /opt/ansible
	cd /opt/ansible
	git pull --rebase
	git submodule update --init --recursive
	# Create directories
	mkdir /etc/ansible/
	chmod 775 /etc/ansible/
	mkdir /etc/ansible/roles
	chmod 775 /etc/ansible/roles
	# Add this to your .bash_profile and restart your console
	vim /home/$USERNAME/.bash_profile
	```
	# Ansible settings
	ANSIBLE=/opt/ansible
	export PATH=$PATH:$ANSIBLE/bin
	export PYTHONPATH=$ANSIBLE/lib
	export ANSIBLE_LIBRARY=$ANSIBLE/library
	export ANSIBLE_HOSTS=/etc/ansible/hosts
	```

view raw ansible.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

After adding my hosts and keys the same way I did here I was able to shutdown my CentOS machine and use my Windows machines to manage my Ansible setup :).