Exercise: Installing Ansible

In this exercise you turn workstation into a working control node: install automation content navigator, log in to the classroom registry, and download the execution environment that later chapters use.

Installing Ansible

Install automation content navigator on a control node.
Download an execution environment image and list it.

Prerequisites: For the free home path, complete control-node setup. Classroom-only registry steps require credentials supplied by that classroom.

From the project directory, run the relevant home-lab check. For an exercise with several checkpoints, grade each state before changing or removing it:

lab grade intro-install

The grader reads project files and host state. A passing report covers the listed checks; also perform the task’s independent connection, repeat-run, and reboot checks where requested.

Explain how you would identify a missing collection inside an execution image when it is installed on workstation.

Record the published result first. The grader checks the original requirements, so a changed name or value may intentionally fail those checks.

Make workstation ready to run and inspect Ansible content.

Navigator must start and report its version.
At home, use the community tools installed in chapter 1 and confirm that runs use workstation's Ansible engine. No registry account is required.
If using the classroom environment, its assigned execution image must be available locally and the registry login must succeed.
Record which engine and runtime you will use before starting chapter 3.

There is nothing to download for this exercise. Workstation already has everything from section 1.6; each task below shows what to run at home to confirm it.

Install the ansible-navigator package

As the student user on workstation, install automation content navigator.

[student@workstation ~]$ sudo dnf install ansible-navigator
[sudo] password for student: student
...output omitted...
Is this ok [y/d/N]: y
...output omitted...

You installed it in section 1.6, from pip into a virtual environment, because Rocky Linux has no RPM for it. Confirm where it lives and which Ansible it will run:

[student@workstation ~]$ which ansible-navigator ansible
~/.local/bin/ansible-navigator
/usr/bin/ansible
[student@workstation ~]$ rpm -q ansible-core
ansible-core-2.14.18-3.el9_8.1.x86_64

Verify the installation

[student@workstation ~]$ ansible-navigator --version
ansible-navigator 2.1.0

[student@workstation ~]$ ansible-navigator --version
ansible-navigator 26.9.0
[student@workstation ~]$ ansible --version | head -1
ansible [core 2.14.18]

Navigator is newer than the classroom version, but it drives the same ansible-core generation as RHEL 9.

Log in to the classroom registry

The classroom's private automation hub runs on utility.lab.example.com. Log in with username admin and password redhat.

[student@workstation ~]$ podman login utility.lab.example.com
Username: admin
Password: redhat
Login Succeeded!

Skip this task. There is no private automation hub at home (utility only serves practice files), and Red Hat's registry needs a subscription. Navigator is configured not to need an image at all:

[student@workstation ~]$ cat ~/.ansible-navigator.yml
---
ansible-navigator:
  mode: stdout
  playbook-artifact:
    enable: false
  execution-environment:
    enabled: false

Download the execution environment

With the execution environment switched off there is nothing to download. To try the container workflow anyway, run ansible-navigator images --ee true -m interactive: navigator pulls the free community image (about 1.5 GB) and shows the same list. That image carries a much newer ansible-core, so keep using the default, container-free setup for the exercises.

Run ansible-navigator images. Navigator notices the image is missing, pulls it, and then lists the images it can use.

[student@workstation ~]$ ansible-navigator images
...output omitted...
Running the command: podman pull utility.lab.example.com/ee-supported-rhel8:latest
...output omitted...

Once the download finishes, navigator shows the list in interactive mode:

  Image                 Tag      Execution environment   Created       Size
0│ee-supported-rhel8    latest   True                    5 weeks ago   1.32 GB

^b/PgUp page up   ^f/PgDn page down   ↑↓ scroll   esc back   [0-9] goto   :help help

Type :0 to inspect the image (its Ansible version, collections and Python packages), then press Esc until you are back at the shell.

Finish

Clean up so this exercise does not affect later ones: lab finish intro-install.

Nothing to clean up: this exercise changed nothing on the servers.

What just happened

You now have the two things every later exercise relies on: the ansible-navigator command, and a local copy of the ee-supported-rhel8 execution environment. When you run a playbook, navigator starts that image with Podman, mounts your project directory into it, and runs Ansible from inside the container.

At home, navigator skips the container and runs /usr/bin/ansible-playbook directly on workstation. The playbooks, the output and the results on the managed hosts are the same; only where Ansible itself runs differs. One practical consequence: localhost in a play is workstation itself, not a container.