Ansible provisioning fails with fedora/23-cloud-base box

I have been playing with Vagrant and ansible recently and got into trouble to make it work.

At first I want to say that I'm not an experienced user of ansible, but I'm sure that there are many people like me therefore I will try to describe it in a way that even I would understand it ;)

Situation

I have Fedora 23  on the host machine with installed Vagrant, ansible, python3, python2 etc. I have Vagrantfile with fedora/23-cloud-base as config.vm.box and provision by ansible.

When I started vagrant provision comand I got this error:

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$ vagrant provision   ==> default: Running provisioner: ansible...     default: Running ansible-playbook... PLAY [vagrant] **************************************************************** GATHERING FACTS *************************************************************** failed: [192.168.25.25] => {"failed": true, "parsed": false} BECOME-SUCCESS-afwahqttsdeueajwfcuqsvaulkoxjixf /bin/sh: /usr/bin/python: No such file or directory OpenSSH_7.1p1, OpenSSL 1.0.2e-fips 3 Dec 2015 debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config debug1: /etc/ssh/ssh_config line 56: Applying options for * debug1: auto-mux: Trying existing master debug1: mux_client_request_session: master session id: 2 Shared connection to 192.168.25.25 closed.   TASK: [apache | Install Apache] *********************************************** FATAL: no hosts matched or all hosts have already failed -- aborting     PLAY RECAP ********************************************************************            to retry, use: --limit @/home/tomor/playbook.retry 192.168.25.25              : ok=0    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=1   Ansible failed to complete successfully. Any error output should be visible above. Please fix these errors and try again.

When I enabled debugging by ansible.verbose="vvv" I saw more output but it didn't help me.

Reason of the fail

The problem is in the fact that 

• ansible needs python 2.x on the remote system and Fedora23 has only python3 installed by default
• python3 does not create /usr/bin/python - because it's not compatible with python2

and that's the reason why ansible provisioning fails - see the beginning of the fail:

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failed: [192.168.25.25] => {"failed": true, "parsed": false} BECOME-SUCCESS-afwahqttsdeueajwfcuqsvaulkoxjixf /bin/sh: /usr/bin/python: No such file or directory

Python is needed for gathering of the facts (setup module).

Solution

To solve this situation you just have to install python 2 on the remote machine.

As I wanted to do the whole installation of the Vagrant box by ansible I solved it by:

1. disable Gathering Facts
2. add installation of python2
3. start gathering facts manually (by setup module)

It means adapting basic playbook like this:

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--- - hosts: vagrant   sudo: true   gather_facts: false # Fedora23 doesn't have python2 installed by default   roles:     - ansible_prepare # install python2, gather facts manually after python is prepared     - my_another_role

And creation of ansible_prepare role task:

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- name: Install python2 on the remote machine   raw: dnf install -y python2 python2-dnf libselinux-python   - name: Gather facts   setup:

Yes, there is just setup: which does gathering of the facts ;)

See the setup module docs for more details.

That's it. 

Sources

• https://fedoramagazine.org/getting-ansible-working-fedora-23/
• http://blog.oddbit.com/2015/10/15/bootstrapping-ansible-on-fedora-23/