I'm new to Ansible and currently work from a Windows computer. A colleague told me that Ansible either cannot be installed on Windows or has serious problems there. Is that accurate? I'm trying to understand both whether Ansible can run from Windows as the control machine and whether it can manage Windows clients or servers.
3 Answers
Running Ansible itself directly on Windows is the part that can be less straightforward. A common solution is to install it inside Windows Subsystem for Linux, or run it in a container. That gives you a Linux environment for the control side while still allowing Ansible to manage Windows systems.
There are two separate questions here. Ansible can manage Windows machines without installing an Ansible client or agent on them. It connects using Windows Remote Management, and it can handle tasks such as installing software, changing registry settings, and joining a domain. In practice, Windows management generally works well for common administration tasks.
Ansible is agentless, so there normally isn’t an Ansible client installed on each managed machine. The control machine runs the Ansible commands and connects to Linux, Windows, and even some network devices using their standard remote-management protocols.
Using Ansible in WSL works well for local projects, especially when combined with container tooling. The important distinction is that WSL is being used to run the Ansible controller; the machines being managed do not need the Ansible package installed.