Installing Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform components on a single machine

[Trevor]

I'm attempting to install AAP on a single machine.  The resource that I'm 
using to guide me on this is:

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_ansible_automation_platform/2.0-ea/html/red_ha...

*** The installer that I'm using is coming from the the tar file:

                        ansible-automation-platform-setup-2.4-2.tar.gz

*** The RHEL version I'm attempting the install on is 9.2

In section 2.1.3 of the resource that I'm using to guide me on this
process, one of the items it shows is:

[automationcontroller]
127.0.0.1 ansible_connection=local

When I execute the setup.sh script, the biggest issue that I see in the output
is the following:

TASK [ansible.automation_platform_installer.check_config_static : Fail if Automation Controller host is localhost] ***
failed: [127.0.0.1 -> localhost] (item=127.0.0.1) => {"ansible_loop_var": "item", "changed": false, "item": "127.0.0.1", "msg": "The host specified in the [automationcontroller] group in your inventory file cannot be localhost. Please update your inventory file properly."}

Okay, the Red Hat resource that I'm using guided me to place

                127.0.0.1  ansible_connection=local

under the [ automationcontroller] group.  However, as you can see, when 
the setup.sh script executes, it's plainly showing a message that the host
specified in the [automationcontroller] group cannot be localhost.

Has anyone seen this before?  I'm just folllowing what's in that Red Hat
resource.

[Travis · Accepted solution]

@Trevor -

I'm not 100% sure if you can do this any more. You are looking at the AAP 2.0 (Early Access) documentation to install the AAP product. For that, you should be installing the Early Access version of AAP.

You grabbed the latest and greatest version of AAP 2.4-2 which is a couple years newer than the documentation you are attempting to use.

Another thing I know to be true ... and this goes back to node functions and other things, we will not have AAP2.x installed with both Automation Controller and Private Automation Hub on the same host.

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_ansible_automation_platform/2.4/html/red_hat_a...

Please also check the system requirements ...

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_ansible_automation_platform/2.4/html/red_hat_a...

When we teach the course, we specifically are installing from a "different" system than where Automation Controller or any other pieces are available. I suspect early on for evaluations and other things, that the installer allowed the "Single Machine" installation but with the GA versions, this has been removed ... especially since AAP 2.4 supports way more features too and has even more components (including some for Event-Drive Ansible).

Here are supported installation scenarios for the latest AAP 2

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_ansible_automation_platform/2.4/html/red_hat_a...

and the inventory file examples

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_ansible_automation_platform/2.4/html/red_hat_a...

One word of caution here is to always look at the documentation source. While you leveraged official AAP documentation from Red Hat it was for a pre-release version. Often as products mature, installation processes, scripts, and requirements change and become no long valid options.

[LIE]

There is the new AAP 2.4 containerized installer in technical preview if your single host is a RHEL 9.2: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_ansible_automation_platform/2.4/html-single/co...

[Travis · Accepted solution]

@Trevor -

What @LIE is correct. I wanted to make sure that this was 100% public-facing now. I also am providing the post where it was announced on Ansible.com Blog.

https://www.ansible.com/blog/announcing-containerized-ansible-automation-platform 

Keep in mind, just as an EA version, tech preview can sometimes be subject to change and not all features might arrive in the GA or final release version of the product. This will however provide you with a good sense of the functionalities of AAP 2.4 components and what they can do. 

However, based on some of the terminology for the other posts, the understanding changes a little because in the traditional non-containerized AAP 2.x deployments, the various node roles had more meaning as you couldn't have things installed on the same physical or virtual machine. The containerized installation Tech Preview allows all services to be running from a single system.