ansible-galaxy role fails with "do not have permission to modify /etc/ansible/roles/"

Question

tl;dr = How do OS X users recommend working around this permissions error?

I'm on OS X 10.10.1 and I recently installed Ansible running the following:

sudo pip install ansible --quiet
sudo pip install ansible --upgrade

I want to start off with a galaxy role to install homebrew and went to run this one with the following error:

$ ansible-galaxy install geerlingguy.homebrew
- downloading role 'homebrew', owned by geerlingguy
- downloading role from https://github.com/geerlingguy/ansible-role-homebrew/archive/1.0.1.tar.gz
- extracting geerlingguy.homebrew to /etc/ansible/roles/geerlingguy.homebrew
- error: you do not have permission to modify files in /etc/ansible/roles/geerlingguy.homebrew
- geerlingguy.homebrew was NOT installed successfully.
- you can use --ignore-errors to skip failed roles.

While I see /etc is owned by root, I don't see any notes in documentation saying I should chmod anything.

For reference:

$ ansible --version
ansible 1.8.2
  configured module search path = None

Is this expected or is my installation somehow wrong?

Answer 1

The default location for roles is /etc/ansible/roles (for version <= 2.3. Since v2.4, the default location has changed to ~/.ansible/roles/, an issue has been raised). You need to specify --roles-path when using ansible-galaxy. Here's what ansible-galaxy install --help says:

-p ROLES_PATH, --roles-path=ROLES_PATH
    The path to the directory containing your roles. The
    default is the roles_path configured in your
    ansible.cfg file (/etc/ansible/roles if not
    configured)

You can also set roles_path in ansible.cfg; see the documentation for details.

Answer 2

Or you can use brew to install ansible. To do it you would need to run:

brew install ansible

If you had any previous installations, it is possible that you will see a message like this:

Error: The brew link step did not complete successfully The formula built, but is not symlinked into /usr/local Could not symlink bin/ansible Target /usr/local/bin/ansible already exists. You may want to remove it: rm '/usr/local/bin/ansible'

To force the link and overwrite all conflicting files: brew link --overwrite ansible

To list all files that would be deleted: brew link --overwrite --dry-run ansible

Possible conflicting files are: /usr/local/bin/ansible /usr/local/bin/ansible-console /usr/local/bin/ansible-doc /usr/local/bin/ansible-galaxy /usr/local/bin/ansible-playbook /usr/local/bin/ansible-pull /usr/local/bin/ansible-vault

So, run brew link --overwrite ansible to fix that. And now you will be able to install any roles without sudo.

Example:

» ansible-galaxy install bennojoy.redis
- downloading role 'redis', owned by bennojoy
- downloading role from https://github.com/bennojoy/redis/archive/master.tar.gz
- extracting bennojoy.redis to /usr/local/etc/ansible/roles/bennojoy.redis
- bennojoy.redis was installed successfully