Ansible control via Windows Subsystem for Linux: still "not a goal"?

Archives Ansible Developer
1

Windows control machine support has long been explicitly declared as not a goal for the project:

http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/intro_windows.html#reminder-you-must-have-a-linux-control-machine

If I recall, this statement was made quite some time ago, prior to WSL’s announcement. Has the emergence of Windows Subsystem for Linux (or perhaps just the passage of time/maintainers), changed your goals with respect to running Ansible on a Windows control machine, or is this still explicitly not a goal?

2

FWIW - running Ansible in wsl works perfectly fine.

regds
/M

3

FWIW - running Ansible in wsl works perfectly fine.

Because it runs in Ubuntu user space

regds
/M

    Windows control machine support has long been explicitly declared as
    not a goal for the project:

    http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/intro_windows.html#reminder-you-must-have-a-linux-control-machine
    <http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/intro_windows.html#reminder-you-must-have-a-linux-control-machine&gt;

    If I recall, this statement was made quite some time ago, prior to
    WSL's announcement. Has the emergence of Windows Subsystem for
    Linux (or perhaps just the passage of time/maintainers), changed
    your goals with respect to running Ansible on a Windows control
    machine, or is this still explicitly not a goal?

Real Windows as a control machine is not very likely to be supported at any time, however running Ansible from the WSL should work fine, because you actually run Ubuntu user space on Windows kernel space.

If you do have problems, look at the Ubuntu installation documentation, that should work straightforward, mostly just some depenencies that are not installed by default, apt-get is your friend.

4

Yeah, I use it a bit, mostly for creating playbooks and roles. Using the corporate vpn messes up my resolv.conf though, so I still keep Linux vms for running playbooks in qa and production environments.

Jon

5

I use WSL all the time as well.
However: Microsoft has been very clear that WSL is a dev tool and nothing more. It won’t run on Server, nor should it be treated as a server-ready “runtime” in any way. It’s just a tool. With that in mind I completely agree with the existing Ansible stance on this. Treat WSL as a way of running ansible during development, and nothing more.