Problem scenario
You are using Google Cloud Platform, and you have a Debian server. You do not want to configure any PPAs for your system.* How do you install and configure Ansible on a Debian Linux system?
Solution
Prerequisite
We strongly recommend having 2.5 GB of memory (either in RAM or with a combination of RAM and swap space). For directions on how to configure swap space in the amount of 2 GB, see this posting. You can get Ansible installed with 0.6 GB of memory. But we do not think the performance would be acceptable with this configuration.
Procedures
1.a. Create a script called ansible.sh in /tmp.
1.b. Have this as the content:
apt-get -y update
apt-get -y install git python-setuptools gcc python-dev libffi-dev python-openssl make
cd /opt
git clone git://github.com/ansible/ansible.git --recursive
cd ansible
python setup.py build
python setup.py install 2. Run this script like this: sudo bash /tmp/ansible.sh
3. Test it was successful: ansible --version
* If you want to try to configure a PPA on Ubuntu Linux, see this external article (https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-install-and-configure-latest-version-of-ansible-on-ubuntu-linux/). If you want to try to configure a PPA on a Debian Linux system, you can use this external link at your own risk.