Ansible AWX is a free and opensource front-end web application that provides a user interface to manage Ansible playbooks and inventories, as well as a REST API for Ansible. It is an open source version of Red Hat Ansible Tower.
In this post we will show you how to install Ansible AWX on Ubuntu 22.04 or Ubuntu 20.04. In order to deploy AWX, it needs some Kubernetes Infrastructure like MicroK8s, K3s or Minikube. In this demo we will be using minikube ( A Single node Kubernetes cluster). Use the following URL for minikube installation,
Prerequisites
Before we get started, ensure that Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04 system has the following:
- 4 GB of RAM
- 3.4 GHz CPU with 2 Cores
- Hard disk space 20 GB
- Internet Connection
- Pre Installed minikube
Let’s jump into Ansible AWX installation steps
Step 1) Install Required Packages
Log in to your Ubuntu system and install following required packages
$ sudo apt install git make -y
Step 2) Start minikube cluster
To start the minikube, run following minikube command as regular user,
$ minikube start --vm-driver=docker --addons=ingress
Execute beneath commands to verify minikube and pods status
$ minikube status $ kubectl get pods -A
Step 3) Deploy Ansible AWX via Operator
Use following git command to get AWX operator,
$ git clone https://github.com/ansible/awx-operator.git $ cd awx-operator/ $ git checkout 2.4.0
Note: At the time of writing this post, latest version of AWX operator was 2.4.0. You can check operator version from “https://github.com/ansible/awx-operator/releases”.
Next , set the namespace “ansibe-awx” and run make deploy command
$ export NAMESPACE=ansible-awx $ make deploy
check the status pods from ansible-awx namespace,
$ kubectl get pods -n ansible-awx
Deploy AWX using following command,
Monitor pods and service status of ansible-awx namespace,
$ kubectl get pods -n ansible-awx $ kubectl get svc -n ansible-awx
Great, output above confirms that AWX pods and service are up and running.
You can track the installation for AWX from pod,
$ kubectl logs awx-operator-controller-manager-6c58d59d97-vvkvc -n ansible-awx -f
Replace pod name as per your setup.
Step 4) Access AWX Dashboard
To access the dashboard from Ubuntu system itself, run following command to get dashboard url,
$ minikube service awx-demo-service --url -n ansible-awx http://192.168.49.2:30182 $
In case, you are trying to access outside of your ubuntu system then run following kubectl command,
$ kubectl port-forward service/awx-demo-service -n ansible-awx --address 0.0.0.0 10445:80
Open the web broswer, type following URL
http://<Ubuntu-System-IP-Address>:10445
To retrieve admin user password, run the following kubectl command,
$ kubectl get secret awx-demo-admin-password -o jsonpath="{.data.password}" -n ansible-awx | base64 --decode; echo
7EliSIHKyM28KLQQcZ2zBzdKWGlnz6JM
$
Copy this password string and paste it on password field on AWX login page,
Click on ‘Login In‘
And there you have it. We have successfully installed AWX on Ubuntu 22.04 and 20.04. I hope you found this post useful and informative. Kindly do post your queries and feedback in below comments section.
Also Read : How to Run and Schedule Ansible Playbook Using AWX GUI
Many thanks for this great effort! The only problem I had was after stopping nginx, there was no more failure. I was then able to access the AWX website.
Hello Everyone, Can someone guide me how add route to access the Ansible clients from the AWX server? Thanks in advance.
Thanks,
Sunil.K
Docker Compose Install did not work for me because the 2nd grep failed due to “Linux” being lowercase “l”. Once I changed it to lowercase, the step passed.
The step: $ curl -s ‘https://api.github.com/repos/docker/compose/releases/latest’ \
| grep browser_download_url | grep docker-compose-Linux-x86_64 \
| cut -d ‘”‘ -f 4 | wget -qi –
Just wanted to confirm if there is bug in this version . I have installed awx using container and version is 17.1.0.
Many of the things are performing in weird way or sometimes not even giving output or error
Actual script:
sudo apt install curl git python3-pip pwgen
curl -sSL ‘https://get.docker.com’ | sh
sudo usermod -aG docker $(whoami) && exit
sudo apt install docker-compose nodejs npm ansible -y
docker-compose version
sudo npm install npm –global
git clone -b 17.1.0 ‘https://github.com/ansible/awx.git’
cd awx/installer
pwgen -N 1 -s 30
nano inventory
ansible-playbook -i inventory install.yml
Hi James,
Now is 2023 July, and probably lots of stuff have changed. I followed your steps and I have a bucket load of errors on the last step (ansible-playbook -i inventory install.yml). I am a newbie in AWX. My question is do you maintain this page?
Hi Sandy,
Yes, Installation approach is changed now. I have updated the post with updated steps.
I have already a working AWX instance and so far everything works great. One question I have is how can I check which python modules have been installed? For example I would like to use winrm for Windows hosts management. If the python modules are mot present, how we can add them to this setup?
How to add SSL certificate on this server to make it accessible over https ?
Good afternoon, great how to, just to complement, if you use kubectl port-forward service/awx-demo-service -n ansible-awx –address 0.0.0.0 10445:80 , it will get the terminal stuck and it keeps listening,
Handling connection for 10445
Handling connection for 10445
Handling connection for 10445
To solve it, just run it with the option ( &> /dev/null & ), example below.
kubectl port-forward service/awx-demo-service -n ansible-awx –address 0.0.0.0 10445:80 &> /dev/null &
Hi Jose,
After following all procedures i’m successfully able to install AWX and login page loads but when i’m giving the credentials it’s getting error like invalid username or password error . Please let us know what’s the solution for this .