Ansible: Up and Running

Appendix A. SSH

Because Ansible uses SSH as its transport mechanism, you’ll need to understand some of SSH’s features to take advantage of them with Ansible.

Native SSH

By default, Ansible uses the native SSH client installed on your operating system. This means that Ansible can take advantage of all of the typical SSH features, including Kerberos and jump hosts. If you have a ~/.ssh/config file with custom configurations for your SSH setup, Ansible will respect these settings.

SSH Agent

There’s a handy program called ssh-agent that simplifies working with SSH private keys.

When ssh-agent is running on your machine, you can add private keys to it using the ssh-add command.

$ ssh-add /path/to/keyfile.pem

Note

The SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable must be set, or the ssh-add command will not be able to communicate with ssh-agent. See “Starting Up ssh-agent”.

You can use the -L flag with the ssh_add program to see which keys have been added to your agent, as shown in Example A-1. This example shows that there are two keys in the agent.

Example A-1. Listing the keys in the agent

$ ssh-add -L ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQDWAfog5tz4W9bPVbPDlNC8HWMfhjTgKOhpSZYI+clc e3/pz5viqsHDQIjzSImoVzIOTV0tOIfE8qMkqEYk7igESccCy0zN9VnD6EfYVkEx1C+xqkCtZTEVuQn d+4qyo222EAVkHm6bAhgyoA9nt9Um9WFO0045yHZL2Do9Z7KXTS4xOqeGF5vv7SiuKcsLjORPcWcYqC fYdrdUdRD9dFq7zFKmpCPJqNwDQDrXbgaTOe+H6cu2f4RrJLp88WY8voB3zJ7avv68eOgah82dovSgw hcsZp4SycZSTy+WqZQhzLogaifvtdgdzaooxNtsm+qRvQJyHkwdoXR6nJgt /Users/lorinhochste ...