Using Ansible through Windows 10's Subsystem for Linux

I just got bogged down in the installation of subsystem, just got an error when I was trying to activate this windows feature.

Any particular reason for using pip rather than the Ansible PPA (e.g. PPAs don't work on WSfL)?

Hi,

When running "sudo apt-get -y install pip python-dev", I received an error
I changed this to "sudo apt-get install python-pip python-dev", and it resolved the issue

Also prior to this I was receiving an "unable to resolve host" error which was resolved with

sudo su
echo 127.0.0.1 your_pc_name >> /etc/hosts

Thanks for the tutorial and hope this can help!

Hi,
After having lots of errors trying to run the pip installed version, I used the steps described in the documentation (http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/intro_installation.html#latest-releases…) and it worked great.

$ sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
$ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install ansible

thank you very much for this - very helpful and saved me loads of time compared to other how-tos I found.

For some reason the pip package is named wrong or has been renamed to python-pip.

So use this command in step 2: sudo apt-get -y install python-pip python-dev

This sudo apt-get -y install python-pip python-dev should be sudo apt-get -y install python-pip python-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev. Otherwise the compilation of the crypto-extensions won't work.

There seems to be permission issue when trying to install a role from the ansible-galaxy after following this guide.

Hi,

First of all, thank you very much for this great tutorial.
So far I managed to get the test.yml to work with no issue.
I am now trying to set a real life scenario and create an ansible hosts but when I go to /etc there isn't an ansible directory..
Do I need to makdir /etc/ansible and then touch /etc/ansible/hosts ?

Could you please assist

Thank you in advance
Fred

Great work Jeff, appreciate your time invested in this post as it saved me the need from running an additional VM

Ansible-galaxy will throw an error unless you add markupsafe package:

sudo pip install markupsafe

Once installed you will be now able to init new boiler plate for ansible galaxy roles or retrieve galaxy roles.

We can also try to install ansible using package manager but it will fail and throw a lot of errors.

Any idea if this works around Ansible issue #9963 (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/9963)?

I encountered this when I created a vault on Mac OS but Windows user using Ansible via Cygwin couldn't decrypt. Would be helpful to hear your experience while I schedule time with one of my colleagues with Windows 10 to try, too.

getting a syntax error... not very familiar with yaml... i just copy / pasted your test file. any ideas?

Hey Jeff,
Any ideas about installing custom ansible modules with this setup? Trying to get win_dsc5 to work and while `ansible windows -m win_dsc5` returns correctly, attempting to call a playbook that leverages the same module fails to find the module. This occurs even with an ansible.cfg defined that calls out the library path...
Thanks

Hi Jeff!

Thanks for a detailed and well presented post. I managed to get ansible working on the Ubuntu subsystem no problem at all controlling remote machines as well as some basic things through the local connection.

I have run into an issue while trying to get ansible to 'become' / sudo on the local ubuntu subsystem. Have you had any issues here or worked around the problem?
I have:
- Tried adding become to tasks, although ansible seems to ignore this
- Tried running ansible-playbook with sudo, which of course doesn't work as the above post only installs it for the one user
- Tried specifying a default sudo user and pass in vars, but it seems to get ignored
- Tried specifying a user when running ansible-playbook and a password using -K

This seems to be the last blocker to being able to use ansible for managing my local system.

Thanks again.
Addshore

Thanks you Jeff for great info.
But I've met with some difficulties. I've installed Zookeeper server and zookeeperd.
But when I tried to monitor service with:
sudo service zookeeper status

I've got that error
Failed to connect to socket /com/ubuntu/upstart

Is any way to fix this problem?

Interesting approach - thanks for posting it! Presumably(?) if you run commands on localhost using this setup, they run under the bash for windows environment? Is there a way to tell ansible to run a task on the "Windows side" of the machine (i.e. using winrm to treat the machine as a Windows host)?

Hi Jeff. Thanks so much for this! Was fairly simple to setup and run a playbook to install and configure packages on a Vagrant Ubuntu machine from Windows!

use the above code to avoid syntax errors

Make sure to add to your apt-get line sshpass.

On Windows 10 with ansible 2.1.0.0, when running the yaml example I get the following error:

Any ideas? I did add localhost to my `/bin/ansible/hosts` file

Hi,

I have installed the Ubuntu package under windows as per the instructions above and when i try and run the pip installation it fails with unable to resolve URL error messages. Have tried looking down this page for others who had the same problems and tried the fixes they suggested and it still fails. Is the archive URL still in place to download these packages?

All help gratefully received

Thanks

David

Cheers for putting this tutorial together!

I was only half paying attention as I was reading and ended up just installing the Ansible package from the Ubuntu repositories via:

apt-get install ansible

I haven't gotten much farther than your debug step, but it looks good so far.

The package manager version is 2.0.0.2, which looks to date from January 2016 (https://releases.ansible.com/ansible/), so fairly out of date in comparison to 2.3.2.0 from July 2017, but we'll see how we go!

Excellent blog

I hit an issue running apt-get and found it was linked to IPv4 where apt-get would get stuck at "Connecting to archive.ubuntu.com"

Answered originally here : https://askubuntu.com/questions/574569/apt-get-stuck-at-0-connecting-to…

I wonder if there is a way for ansible to check if it is running under WSL, so that you could use it for conditionals.

Thanks for putting together this guide, it's great to be able to use Ansible from my laptop. And thanks for all the other Ansible and Drupal resources you have made available.

Have you come across this issue with trying to encrypt files into Ansible Vault?

*****@*****:/mnt/c/dev/ansible$ ansible-vault encrypt restric.yml -vvv
Using /mnt/c/dev/ansible/ansible.cfg as config file
New Vault password:
Confirm New Vault password:
ERROR! Unexpected Exception: /home/********/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cryptography/hazmat/bindings/_openssl.so: cannot enable executable stack as shared object requires: Invalid argument
the full traceback was:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/********/.local/bin/ansible-vault", line 109, in <module>
    exit_code = cli.run()
  File "/home/********/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/ansible/cli/vault.py", line 158, in run
    self.execute()
...
ImportError: /home/********/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cryptography/hazmat/bindings/_openssl.so: cannot enable executable stack as shared object requires: Invalid argument

Hi all,

i'm getting error in the initial steps. After enabled bash cmd. it asking 'type y to continue' to install ubuntu in windows. them pressing y, downloading start. cmd line window automatically closed after reached 100%. again hit bash cmd, show same error. anyone assist me

you're amazing. Its so easy and well written blog for ppl who wants to learn ansible in windows 10. I did so much research during my bash setup and i wish I could found this early then. !!!
Happy coding.

Hey thanks for this tutorial, I got everything working pretty smoothly until it came time to encrypt vault.yml (refer Jason Lengtstorf's YouTube tutorial). I get an error to do with Ubuntu seeing every file as executable.

$ ansible-vault encrypt group_vars/production/vault.yml

[WARNING]: Error in vault password file loading (default): Problem running vault password script
/mnt/d/Dev/learn-trellis/trellis/.vault-pass ([Errno 8] Exec format error). If this is not a
script, remove the executable bit from the file.

ERROR! Problem running vault password script /mnt/d/Dev/learn-trellis/trellis/.vault-pass ([Errno 8] Exec format error). If this is not a script, remove the executable bit from the file.

No worries, I think, those perms are messed up anyway let's have a clean up via chmod maybe some chown too. No such luck -- WSL doesn't support POSIX permissions. Bash registers the command fine, but no bits are changed on the files. Have you worked around this issue running Ansible on Ubuntu on Windows or know of anyone who has?

Thanks again!

Thanks so much for this! As an FYI for anyone using this, check the $HOME/.local/bin direction post-install, before trying to manually add it. I had a suspicion, and it did turn out that that directory was automatically added to the PATH.

(Note this is from a fresh install, with update, of the Ubuntu version of the subsystem.)

If you get the following error "E: Unable to locate package python-pip" error try running "sudo apt-get update" first.

On one machine in the office here, this works great.
On three other machines, we're running into `SSLError: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='192...', port=5986): Max retries exceeded with url: /wsman (Caused by SSLError(SSLError("bad handshake: SysCallError(-1, 'Unexpected EOF')",),))
fatal: [192...]: UNREACHABLE`

We asked on Stackoverflow too: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49625721/eof-occurred-in-violation-…

Here's the full error:

Is this something anyone else here as come across?

Hi, Thanks for such a wonderful article, everything went smooth so far on my windows 10, unfortunately i its not running the test
i have searched and tried to look for the answer, below is the same error after having created hosts entry, any help on this?

I just bought the book and now I'm trying to get started with ansible. But I get stuck at chapter two when I try to do the provisioning. I am running this on Windows 10 WSL. This is what I get when I try to do the provisioning, at the end I list the versions on ansible and vagrant that I get. I also went to the suggested link for the problem, https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/provisioning/ansible_common.html#compatibility_mode But I'm not really sure how to add that to the vagrant file.

Yes, but can you run the win_* modules or would that need to be done from a different host?

Running under Ubuntu-WSL I got the same error as many people before me:

Fixed. Syntax error says it all. But i was not the only one who overlooked this. I needed to begin with 3 dashes. The first on line one column 1.

Hi, thanks a lot for the guide. Still, it's 2019, and it's pretty painless now, just install WSL with Ubuntu 18.04, and "sudo apt install ansible" get you up & running :). Could you please update the blog accordingly?

Thank you for this, it worked great for me. One thing I'd like to mention is when I ran through this and I tried to run the playbook for the first time I received some errors, once I sudo the command it worked for me "sudo ansible-playbook".

Perhaps a step to add between 1 and 2 in Installing Ansible: run `sudo apt update`
That's necessary with a new install, otherwise you get "E: Unable to locate package python-pip"

Have followed all the instructions above, however sudo ansible-playbook test.yml --connection=local runs to success, but ansible-playbook test.yml --connection=local fails on gathering facts:

TASK [Gathering Facts] ***************************************************************************************************************
fatal: [localhost]: FAILED! => {"ansible_facts": {}, "changed": false, "failed_modules": {"setup": {"cmd": "/mnt/c/opscode/chefdk/bin/ohai", "failed": true, "invocation": {"module_args": {"fact_path": "/etc/ansible/facts.d", "filter": "*", "gather_subset": ["all"], "gather_timeout": 10}}, "msg": "[Errno 2] No such file or directory", "rc": 2}}, "msg": "The following modules failed to execute: setup\n"}

Should ansible-playbook work without sudo?

starting us off with a spacing error. My test.yml would not work unless I put an extra carriage return between the hosts: and tasks:

Harkening back to Cygwin, you can also us MSYS2

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Install MSYS2:
# @see https://www.msys2.org/

pacman -S base-devel msys2-devel gcc
pacman -S python3 python3-pip
pacman -S libffi libffi-devel libcrypt libcrypt-devel
pacman -S openssl openssl-devel

CFLAGS=-I/usr/lib/libffi-3.2.1/include python -m pip install ansible

Thanks man, this worked great. I already had wsl2 on my desktop, and I was thinking there might be a docker container with Ansible, and then I found this article. Now I am ready to lean Ansible.

These instructions worked for me(windows 10, build 2004 WSL2) after sight modification:

Change

sudo apt-get -y install python-pip python-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev

to

sudo apt-get -y install python3-pip python3-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev

Thanks Jeff!

Thank you very much for this blog Jeff. Really appreciate it!