Scrapbook: Setup Ansible and Google Cloud SDK on Windows

My company laptop is Windows and lately I want to try Ansible. It took quite a long time for me to setup and ready for my experiment so I’m writing the steps here as a memo for the future.

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WSL

WSL stands for “Windows Subsystem for Linux”. Even though Windows supports Git bash but it’s like bash emulator while WSL is a full Linux environment. And Ansible is not supported on Windows natively, so we need WSL for the case.

Windows Subsystem for Linux Documentation

Overview of the Windows Subsystem for Linux documentation.

learn.microsoft.com

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Ansible

Ansible is Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC) as well as Terraformtag: Terraform with great functionalities running on Python.

Ansible by design offers tasks configuration so I find it plays well on running sequential workflows. While Terraform is best at structure provisioning.¹

Ansible Collaborative

Ansible Collaborative

redhat.com

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Setup time

1. WSL

On Powershell or Terminal, install WSL via the command.

wsl --install

To uninstall, run this².

wslconfig /u Ubuntu

2. Python

Open WSL and execute the following commands to install Python and family.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y python3 python3-venv python3-pip

Now we have Python and pip installed.

3. venv

On WSL, create venv.

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

If an error occurs when creating .venv, for example ensurepip is not available and /bin/activate doesn’t appear like me, try creating .venv in Linux home path.

cd ~                          # go to Linux home directory
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

4. Ansible and Google Cloud library

Next is to install our main tools, Ansible and Google Cloud Python library.

python -m pip install --upgrade pip
python -m pip install ansible google-auth google-cloud-<service>

We also need Google Cloud Ansible library via ansible-galaxy.

ansible-galaxy is a community to find third-party library for Ansible. ansible-galaxy is included and is ready out-of-the-box when we successfully installed Ansible.

ansible-galaxy collection install google.cloud

5. Google Cloud SDK

And install gcloud-sdk for Ubuntu for authentication in our machine.

gcloud auth login
gcloud auth application-default login

6. Verify

Last step is to ensure our environment is ready to go.

ansible --version
ansible-galaxy --version
gcloud -v

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Finally we are supposed to develop Ansible workflow (on Windows) from now on.

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References

1. Difference Between Terraform Vs Ansible - GeeksforGeeks 

2. bash - How to completely uninstall the subsystem for Linux on Windows 10? - Super User