Install Ansible, Molecule, Vagrant on Windows WSL

Ansible is a really cool and very popular config management (and a lot more!) tool but sadly the control plane only runs on Linux based systems.  As primarily a Windows user I wanted to see if it would function in the “newish” WSL environment and after a lot of trial and error found that it works great!  In this quick post I go over how to install Ansible for config management, Molecule to test roles, Vagrant to run the tests all while running on Windows WSL.

---

Windows Setup

1. Install Virtual Box
2. Install Ubuntu WSL
3. Reboot computer

WSL Setup

1. Run Ubuntu from the start menu and upgrade all packages

   sudo apt update && apt upgrade -y
   

2. Install Ansible

   sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible
   sudo apt install ansible
   

3. Install Python pip

   sudo apt-get install -y python-pip libssl-dev
   

4. Install Pip packages

   sudo pip install molecule
   sudo pip install python-vagrant
   

5. Set ENV variable so vagrant knows its running in WSL

   export VAGRANT_WSL_ENABLE_WINDOWS_ACCESS="1"
   

6. Install Vagrant and plugins

   sudo apt install vagrant  
   sudo vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirt
   

7. In order for WSL to know where Virtual box is installed some additional paths need to be added

   export PATH=$PATH:/mnt/c/Windows/System32
   export PATH="$PATH:/mnt/c/Program Files/Oracle/VirtualBox"
   

8. If you want to prevent the need to run the above EXPORT commands on every login add the following to the bottom of ~/.bashrc

   export VAGRANT_WSL_ENABLE_WINDOWS_ACCESS="1"  
   export PATH=$PATH:/mnt/c/Windows/System32  
   export PATH="$PATH:/mnt/c/Program Files/Oracle/VirtualBox"
   

9. You are now ready to run Ansible and Molecule with WSL!

Molecule Gotchas

By default, Molecule uses the ubuntu/xenial64 box for test runs.  During my initial testing I kept encountering an error like the one below. 

After inspecting the /tmp/molecule/base-test/default/vagrant-instance.err log I found this.

Stderr: VBoxManage.exe: error: RawFile#0 failed to create the raw output file /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/molecule/provisioner/ansible/playbooks/vagrant/ubuntu-xenial-16.04-cloudimg-console.log (VERR_PATH_NOT_FOUND)  
VBoxManage.exe: error: Details: code E_FAIL (0x80004005), component ConsoleWrap, interface IConsole

After some searching, I found the following workaround for molecule.yml and everything started to run correctly.

"customize [ 'modifyvm', :id, '--uartmode1', 'disconnected' ]"