Hello.
This evening, I went to the inaugural London Ansible meet-up, which I found useful. As a result, I’ve decided to try out Ansible and see how I get to grips with it. I’m a Puppet user at the moment, but it would be good to learn another config management tool, too.
AIUI, and at a high level, Ansible configures remote machines using SSH. The configuration is stored in YAML, and then the Ansible control server translates between YAML and actual commands to run on machines.
In the land of Puppet, we can use a standalone installation of Puppet - installing the master and the agent on the same machine, or do away entirely with the master and use puppet apply manifest.yaml and just rely on the agent. Standalone installation is supported.
What’s the support for standalone installations of Ansible like? Is it recommended, or should I stay well clear?
Thanks,
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
Ansible can totally run in local mode.
In the play, either do “connection: local” or just do “-c local” at the command line level.
There’s also ansible-pull if you really want something pull based, but push is better 
I don’t think you would explicitly need to do that because most of the Puppet complexity simply drops off the map with keysigning and other ilk, though if you want to, that’s entirely possible.
–Michael
Hey Michael,
Wow - that was a speedy reply! Thanks!
Great, as I’ll envisage running Ansible locally to begin with, it makes sense to just include it in my plays.
I hadn’t really given much consideration to push and pull with Ansible yet, but I prefer push-based stuff in general, so that would have been my mode of choice anyway
I’ll spin up a DigitalOcean droplet, and have a play. Might even get around to giving its Windows support a run, too 
Thanks!
Andrew