Ansible installed via pip3, but Ansible commands not found

Question

I have installed Ansible via pip3, but I can't find the Ansible commands (ansible --version, ansible-playbook, etc.)

Here's the listing that shows that Ansible is installed via pip3:

:~# pip3 list  | grep ansible
DEPRECATION: The default format will switch to columns in the future. You can use --format=(legacy|columns) (or define a format=(legacy|columns) in your pip.conf under the [list] section) to disable this warning.
ansible (3.1.0)
ansible-base (2.10.7)

But I can find no file or what so ever in /usr/bin and the commands are not found:

:~/.ansible# ls -ltrha
total 12K
drwx------ 3 root root 4.0K Feb  3 11:42 .
drwx------ 3 root root 4.0K Mar 19 16:01 tmp
drwx------ 8 root root 4.0K Mar 22 15:34 ..

Do I need to configure something? Is my installation done improperly?

I use Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch)

Answer 1

Add the ~/.local/bin to PATH environment variable You can do it by Executing the below command in your Unix terminal

export PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin

Answer 2

I got the same on my ubuntu WSL installation. Just uninstall it using:

python3 -m pip uninstall ansible

Move to home directory:

cd ~

Your prompt will show :~$

Reinstall it again:

python3 -m pip install --user ansible

Now it is working :)

:~$ ansible --version
ansible [core 2.13.1]
config file = None
configured module search path = ['/home/evert/.ansible/plugins/modules', '/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
ansible python module location = /home/evert/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/ansible
ansible collection location = /home/evert/.ansible/collections:/usr/share/ansible/collections
executable location = /home/evert/.local/bin/ansible
python version = 3.8.10 (default, Nov 26 2021, 20:14:08) [GCC 9.3.0]
jinja version = 3.1.2
libyaml = True

Answer 3

This situation tends to happen as @micke commented - while using pip3 as root user - the installed CLI tool may end up in a directory that's not included in $PATH environment variable - then you need to adjust $PATH.

Tested on Debian10 all performs as expected:

root@d10:~# pip3 install ansible
Collecting ansible
  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/fd/f8/071905c6a67592d0852a9f340f6ab9226861eeeb97fdf4068642b22edcf3/ansible-4.10.0.tar.gz (36.8MB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 36.8MB 35kB/s 
#pip3 install log truncated...
 root@d10:~# ansible --version
[DEPRECATION WARNING]: Ansible will require Python 3.8 or newer on the controller starting with Ansible 2.12. Current version: 3.7.3 (default, Jan 22 2021, 
20:04:44) [GCC 8.3.0]. This feature will be removed from ansible-core in version 2.12. Deprecation warnings can be disabled by setting 
deprecation_warnings=False in ansible.cfg.
ansible [core 2.11.7] 
  config file = None
  configured module search path = ['/root/.ansible/plugins/modules', '/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
  ansible python module location = /usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/ansible
  ansible collection location = /root/.ansible/collections:/usr/share/ansible/collections
  executable location = /usr/local/bin/ansible
  python version = 3.7.3 (default, Jan 22 2021, 20:04:44) [GCC 8.3.0]
  jinja version = 3.0.3
  libyaml = True
root@d10:~# which ansible
/usr/local/bin/ansible

Answer 4

Use this command

cp .local/bin/ansible  /usr/local/bin

or

mv .local/bin/ansible /usr/local/bin

root@DESKTOP-3PFRNOB:~# ansible
usage: ansible [-h] [--version] [-v] [-b] [--become-method BECOME_METHOD] [--become-user BECOME_USER] [-K | --become-password-file BECOME_PASSWORD_FILE] [-i INVENTORY] 

Answer 5

You can add the path to your .bashrc so it get loaded for every terminal session

~/.bashrc

if [ -d "$HOME/.local/bin" ] ; then
    PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"
fi

reload your bashrc, run this or close all shells and reopen

source ~/.bashrc

if all working, you should see the path to your binary when running which ansible