Rubenerd

Last week I talked about using Ansible for FreeBSD automation, but forgot to address the other elephant in the room: Ansible can’t find Python on FreeBSD hosts.

The problem

As per its Linux heritage, Ansible defaults to the following Python path:

/usr/bin/python

FreeBSD (and NetBSD, and Solaris, and macOS with Homebrew, et.al) put Python elsewhere, which Ansible can’t find. It’s a curious design decision, we’ve had the following portable shebang recommended for years:

#!/usr/bin/env python

This issue thread suggests the Ansible developers don’t see this as a bug. So it’s up to us to work around it for platform-agnostic playbooks.

Solution 1: Symlinks

As part of your bootstrapping process, you can install Python from pkgng or ports, then symlink:

# ln -s /usr/local/bin/python /usr/bin/python

This works, but is fragile and nasty. We can do better.

Solution 2: Grouped FreeBSD hosts

In your Ansible hosts or inventory files, group your FreeBSD hosts and apply a var to them:

[freebsd]
houki
charlotte
[freebsd:vars]
ansible_python_interpreter="/usr/local/bin/python"

Solution 3: All hosts

If you only target FreeBSD hosts, you can set the var for all hosts:

[freebsd:vars]
ansible_python_interpreter="/usr/local/bin/python"

Solution 4: All hosts for env Python

Hey wait a minute, I’ve got an idea. You can do the same thing as above, even if you have a mix of different hosts:

[all:vars]
ansible_python_interpreter="/usr/bin/env python"

Huzzah, it works! This will now become part of my Ansible boilerplate.