Ansible Navigator is a tool and a part of the Ansible Automation Platform, which helps in creating playbooks. The content navigator can install it via the Python pip method. we can say the automation platform is a combination of different components like Ansible core and automation execution environment. The playbook run functionality is provided by core packages. Through the core package, ansible provides a large number of modules.
Here I am discussing two major components of the Automation Platform. The Content Navigator and Execution Environment installation and setup.
Ansible Navigator and Execution Environment
Navigator is a utility, which manages the work of different Ansible components like ansible-playbook, ansible-config, and inventory. The execution environment is a container form image that consists of different components like libraries, core packages, and ansible collections, which need to run your playbooks.
How do navigator and execution environments work?
When you run a playbookthe navigator selects the execution environment. In which all modules, collections, and libraries exist and process it.
Installing ansible-navigator with an execution environment ( ee ) on Linux
Here I am installing a navigator on the main control system machine, from where I can manage my managed remote hosts. And the execution environment ( ee ) needs its container image. So we need a prerequisite podman or docker utility to install. Only one utility will be installed Either docker or podman . Below steps should support different Linux-based operating systems like CentOS Stream, Rocky, AlmaLinux, and Oracle Linux.
For the Docker, utility , Follow the Docker for Linux installation instructions.
OR
1. Below command will install the Podman utility.
# sudo yum install podman
2. Now navigator package will be installed through the Python package manager through the pip utility.
# sudo dnf install python3-pip
3. Installing navigator :
# python3 -m pip install ansible-navigator --user
4. Now add the installation path :
# echo 'export PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.profile
5. Refresh the environment variable.
#source ~/.profile
6. Verify that the automation content navigator is installed on the system.
# ansible-navigator --version
7. Now after the installation of the utility the execution environment container image will be downloaded. Installed through the ansible-navigator image command will download the image.
# ansible-navigator images
Press Esc to exit from the container images. Or you can execute only the ansible-navigator command to only install the container image.
# ansible-navigator
