WSL and Ansible

Ansible is a powerful open source automation language. It’s also a complete deployment and orchestration tool. It provides drop-in replacements for many core capabilities in other automation solutions, whilst also seeking to solve IT challenges, such as CI/CD. Ansible is an agentless automation tool that by default manages machines over the SSH protocol or WinRM on Windows. Ansible can be installed on many Linux distros however it can't be installed directly on Windows.

The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a compatibility layer for running GNU/Linux binary executables natively on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019. It supports running most command-line tools, utilities, and applications unmodified, without the overhead of a traditional virtual machine or dualboot setup You can install many GNU/Linux distributions ontop of the subsystem kernel. In this article we will be using Ubuntu.

I often find it useful to have Ansible installed on your development machine for simple commands like encrypting / decrypting password in ansible-vault.

Installing/Enabling WSL and Ubunti

First enable the Sub System through the Windows Features settings

Then install ubuntu from the Microsoft Store

    sudo apt update
    sudo apt upgrade
    sudo apt install -y python3-pip
    python3 -m pip update pip
    sudo python3 -m pip install git+https://github.com/ansible/ansible.git@v2.10.4

    Install-Module WslInterop

    notepad $profile

    Import-WslCommand ansible-vault
    Import-WslCommand ansible
    Import-WslCommand ssh
    Import-WslCommand grep