Setup Ansible Control Node in Offline Environment - CloudCommandos/JohnChan GitHub Wiki

Assumptions

• You will be running Ansible in an Ubuntu Focal VM.
• You have private apt repositories

Prepare Packages

Start with an online VM that matches the specs of your target VM.

Configure apt uplink servers to your private apt repositories

sudo mv /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.bak
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

# This is just an example
deb http://private_apt_domain.com:8081/repository/apt-proxy-ubuntu/ focal main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://private_apt_domain.com:8081/repository/apt-proxy-ubuntu/ focal-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://private_apt_domain.com:8081/repository/apt-proxy-ubuntu/ focal-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://private_apt_domain.com:8081/repository/apt-proxy-ubuntu/ focal-backports main restricted universe multiverse

deb http://private_apt_domain.com:8081/repository/apt-hosted-ubuntu-focal/ focal main

Install python3-pip and sshpass

sudo apt update
sudo apt install python3-pip
sudo apt install sshpass

Install ansible via pip3

pip3 install ansible

(Situational) Install other packages that your ansible playbooks may need

pip3 install pyopenssl
pip3 install pyvmomi
pip3 install pywinrm
pip3 install jmespath

Install pipdeptree via pip3 (we will use this tool to get pip package dependency tree)

pip3 install pipdeptree

Generate the requirements.txt file

pipdeptree -fl --warn silence | grep -P '^[\w0-9\-=.]+' > requirements.txt

Download packages specified in requirements.txt and store in pip3_packages folder

pip3 download -r requirements.txt -d ./pip3_packages

Setup Offline VM

(Situational) You may need to add into ~/.ssh/config support for legacy algorithms for SSH

nano ~/.ssh/config

Host x.x.x.x
    KexAlgorithms +diffie-hellman-group1-sha1

Configure apt uplink servers to your private apt repositories (Same step in the online VM section).

Install python3-pip and sshpass

sudo apt update
sudo apt install python3-pip
sudo apt install sshpass

Transfer over all contents of pip3_packages folder and requirments.txt. Then install packages specified in requirements.txt offline using the packages in pip3_packages folder

sudo pip3 install -r requirements.txt --no-index --find-links ./pip3_packages