December 13, 2019Author • Georgi Marokov

Configure development Windows machine with Ansible

Ansible
Windows

Why Ansible for local machine

I'm not sure if the majority of developers like setting up their own development machines or find this process cumbersome. Take the quick poll to find out!

Being coding buddy to new starter colleagues, we have spent plenty of time trying to install multiple software tools and SDKs. This is common sense, right? So why not automate it? All your company`s development software pre-install and ready to be used. Out of the box. I'd like to share my experience attempting to automate this process. It might be useful for someone trying to do something crazy similar.

Using Ansible to target localhost on Linux is like click-click-go, but it's a bit different when it's comes to Windows. We need to install WSL on Windows, Ansible on WSL, Enable WinRM on Windows and finally control it from WSL.

Install Ansible on WSL

To start, let's the following commands from within PowerShell:

Enable WSL: This command activates the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux

Install Ubuntu: Choose your desired Linux distribution and install it. Here, I've used a command to install the Ubuntu distribution, but you're free to select another from list of supported systems.
```
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://aka.ms/wsl-ubuntu-1604 -OutFile Ubuntu.appx -UseBasicParsing
```
Update Packages: Once you're inside your WSL, make sure to update the package list.
```
sudo apt-get update
```

Install Ansible: Proceed to install Ansible on your WSL, setting up the necessary components.

 sudo apt install software-properties-common
 sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible
 sudo apt update
 sudo apt install ansible

Install Packages for WinRM Support: This step equips your system with packages that are essential for WinRM support.
```
sudo apt install python-pip
sudo pip install pywinrm
sudo pip install xmltodict
```

Enabling WinRM

By default, WinRM functions only for Private or Domain networks. Although you have the option to skip network profile checks by providing the -SkipNetworkProfileCheck parameter to Enable-PSRemoting, I wouldn't recommend it. A safer approach is to designate your trusted network as private and then proceed to enable WinRM using PowerShell with the following command:

Enable-PSRemoting

Make sure to enable Basic Authentication and unencrypted connections using the following commands:

Set-Item -Path WSMan:\localhost\Service\Auth\Basic -Value $true
Set-Item -Path WSMan:\localhost\Service\AllowUnencrypted -Value $true

Running the Playbook

With your environment configured, you can now use ansible-pull to run the playbook. The linked playbook installs Chocolatey and a selection of packages from it. Detailed list is available in the repository. Feel free to modify it to your needs. Provide your Windows machine's username and password to initiate the process.

ansible-pull –U https://github.com/gmarokov/ansible-win-postinstall.git -e ansible-user=your_win_user ansible_password=your_win_user_password

Conclusion

As a developer, you likely fine-tune your operating system to cater to your specific needs – I'm no exception. I've also created playbooks for Ubuntu and Fedora. Feel free to explore them if you're using one of these Linux distributions.