So weWe're using Ansible for a lot of our deployments. This agent-less configuration management tool requires almost no overhead, and this low barrier of entrance to entry enables people from our community to contribute deployment code. So far so good.
The Ansible code has seen a few major changes over the last years, which unfortunately causes cause some features to change, disappear, or even break.
It is impractical to refactor large projects to work with the latest Ansible version, so there is a need to able to use different specific Ansible versions for specific deployments.
On my MacOS computer I usually use the HomeBrew package manager , which to provide me with Ansible, and this works OK for Ansible. Switching between different Ansible versions is possible, but in practise this is only possible works if you have cached the old version, i.e. you have been installing and updating versions continuously. Picking a random older version is very tedious at best.
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This allows you to isolate a complete python environment, and install a specific version of Ansible. With the help of some bash aliases this you can be conveniently automatedswitch between all versions.
Assuming you install this in your home directory:
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mkdir ~/.virtualenvs
virtualenv ~/.virtualenvs/ansible-2.3.3
source ~/.virtualenvs/ansible-2.3.3/bin/activate
pip install ansible==2.3.3
deactivate |
Repeat this for every version you want to be able to use.
Then add a line like this to your .bash_profile for each version:
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alias ansible-activate-2.3.3="source ~/.virtualenv/ansible-2.3.3/bin/activate" |
have the required basic tools available, run this bash script:
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<script src="https://gitlab.com/snippets/1769242.js"></script> |
When this finishes, open up a new terminal and start typing ansible-activate You you can just type ansible-activate and use tab completion to pick the specific version.
Obviously you can use ansible to install ansible - for instance onto a deployment VM or bastion host:
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| language | bash |
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| theme | Midnight |
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version 
This works for Linux distros as well - each distro does require it's own preparations:
| Distro | Requirements |
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| CentOS7 | |