How to test if Ansible is installed

04 Feb 2026 🔖 devops linux
💬 EN

You could, of course, just run ansible --version after attempting to install the Ansible Core CLI and its Python dependency onto a Linux box.

But if you’d like to test more realistic use of the Ansible CLI in “control node” mode, you can also try running a small Ansible codebase I made.

Security warning

Please don’t run code from my “Ansible demo” repository on GitHub without auditing its contents yourself. (It’s not very long, so hopefully it won’t take you much time.) I am a stranger on the internet, after all.

Execute Ansible

PowerShell approach

cd ~

git clone https://github.com/kkgthb/ansible-01.git

& ~/ansible-01/.cicd_pipeline_helpers/i_only_run_on_posix_not_windows.ps1

Bash approach

cd ~

git clone https://github.com/kkgthb/ansible-01.git

chmod +x ~/ansible-01/.cicd_pipeline_helpers/i_only_run_on_posix_using_bash.sh

~/ansible-01/.cicd_pipeline_helpers/i_only_run_on_posix_using_bash.sh

Validate results

Confirm helloworld file was created

ls -la ~/ansible_play/files_go_here

This should show a helloworld.txt file that didn’t exist before you ran my Ansible code.

Confirm logs were created

ls -la ~/ansible-01/ansible_demo_01/test-results/junit-results

This should show some .xml files that didn’t exist before you ran my Ansible code.