By Shivam Anand — 23 Apr 2025

Quick Start Ansible for AWS

Starter Ansible template for AWS

Create a host and a managed-node

Then install ansible inside host. Below command is for Amazon linux2.

sudo amazon-linux-extras install ansible2

Verify ansible is installed

ansible --version

Copy contents of pem file to host (Assuming you created managed-node on AWS and you downloaded your .pem file with which you can SSH to your managed-node). Read the contents of .pem file and copy-paste to a new file key.pem. You can use vim or nano editor to paste contents. You need to reduce the permission of your key file.

 chmod 400 key.pem

Now in your ansible host machine. Add key file to ssh-agent.

ssh-agent bash
cp key.pem ~/.ssh/
chmod 400 ~/.ssh/key.pem
ssh-add ~/.ssh/key.pem

Create inventory file inventory.txt. Inventory file is used to store hosts meta-data. Here we are explicityly creating a host file but the default host file is located in /etc/ansible/hosts

Create host file

touch inventory.txt

Inside the file paste

myservers ansible_host=54.242.242.100 ansible_connection=ssh ansible_user=ec2-user

Try to ping the host and check if you have a successful connection

 ansible myservers -m ping -i inventory.txt

make sure you are in the same session in which you added bash key, if not you may want to do again ssh-agent bash & ssh-add ~/.ssh/key.pem

To disble host checking every time. Set host_key_checking = False in /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg

sudo vi /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg

Inside the ansible.cfg file. Uncomment the line below.

host_key_checking = False # uncomment this line

Now start writing playbook. Create a file install-ngix.yaml. Here is an example playbook. You can create a playbook of your own.

- name: Setup nginx on server list
  hosts: myserver
  become: True

  tasks:

    - name: install latest version of nginx
      command: amazon-linux-extras install nginx1.12=latest -y

    - name: start nginx service
      service:
          name: nginx
          state: started

    - name: enable nginx service
      service:
          name: nginx
          enabled: yes

    - name: Get nginx version
      command: nginx -v

    - name: Get status nginx service
      command: systemctl status nginx

Now run the playbook

ansible-playbook install-nginx.yaml -vv

Ansible will start a nginx server in your managed-node. If Ansible successfully deployed nginx and you are still cannot open your nginx site on your managed-mode, try to check your security groups, network settings and firewall settings.

 chmod 400 key.pem