We can install the AWS Ansible Collection in two different ways, depending on the system we use. On Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or CentOS, we can add a new RPM repository and install packages using yum or dnf. On other distributions, we can use ansible-galaxy command for installation.

We need to install the boto3 python package separately in both cases.

NOTE: To use AWS Ansible Collection, we need to have Ansible 2.9+ installed. Previous Ansible versions do not support Ansible Collections well enough to be usable.

Installing collection from RPM

To add the AWS Ansible Collection repository to RHEL or CentOS, we need to create a new file called /etc/yum.repos.d/steampunk-aws.repo and fill it with the following content:

[steampunk-aws]
name=steampunk-aws
baseurl=https://steampunk.si/repos/rhel/$releasever/
enabled=1

Once we have done this, we can install the AWS Ansible Collection by running:

$ sudo yum install --nogpgcheck aws-ansible-collection  # For RHEL and CentOS 7
$ sudo dnf install --nogpgcheck aws-ansible-collection  # For RHEL and CentOS 8

To test the installation, we can run the next command:

$ ansible-doc steampunk.aws.ec2_instance

This should print out documentation for the EC2 instance module.

Installing collection using ansible-galaxy

If we are not using any of the supported distributions, we can install the AWS Ansible Collection by running:

$ ansible-galaxy collection install https://steampunk.si/galaxy/steampunk-aws-0.8.4.tar.gz

To verify the installation, we can run

$ ansible-doc steampunk.aws.ec2_instance

If the previous command printed out the API documentation, we are all set.

Installing boto3 python package

In order to be able to use all of the AWS Ansible Collection features, we also need to install boto3 python package. We can do this using the following command:

$ pip3 install --user -U boto3

Now we can use all of the AWS features that collection supports.