Downgrading Ansible Engine on CentOS 7/ RHEL 7

How to downgrade Ansible engine on RHEL 7 / CentOS 7 ?.  If you install ansible engine from EPEL repository, it will install the latest ansible engine. I had a hard time with latest ansible engine due to incompatibility with specific tasks. For example, Openshift deployment works fine with Ansible engine 2.7 and fails with 2.8 version.  In such cases, we need to downgrade the ansible engine version to the desired one. This article will walk you through how to downgrade the ansible engine version from 2.8 to 2.7.

 

Environment:

• RHEL 7 / CentOS 7
• EPEL repository configured.
• Ansible Engine version 2.8

 

1. Check the current ansible version.

[root@ansible-server ~]# ansible --version
ansible 2.8.0
  config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
  configured module search path = [u'/root/.ansible/plugins/modules', u'/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
  ansible python module location = /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/ansible
  executable location = /usr/bin/ansible
  python version = 2.7.5 (default, Apr 11 2018, 07:36:10) [GCC 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-28)]
[root@ansible-server ~]#

 

2. To downgrade the ansible engine, we will use the pip. Ensure the pip2 (Package manager) is installed.

[root@ansible-server ~]# pip2 --version
pip 19.0.3 from /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip (python 2.7)
[root@ansible-server ~]#

 

3. To bring the ansible engine to 2.7.x again, you must use pip2 and specify the required ansible engine version.

[root@ansible-server ~]# pip install ansible==2.7.10
Collecting ansible==2.7.10
  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/9a/9d/5e3d67bd998236f32a72f255394eccd1e22b3e2843aa60dc30dd164816d0/ansible-2.7.10.tar.gz (11.8MB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 11.8MB 540kB/s
Requirement already satisfied: jinja2 in /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages (from ansible==2.7.10) (2.7.2)
Requirement already satisfied: PyYAML in /usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages (from ansible==2.7.10) (3.13)
Requirement already satisfied: paramiko in /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages (from ansible==2.7.10) (2.1.1)
Requirement already satisfied: cryptography in /usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages (from ansible==2.7.10) (2.3.1)
Requirement already satisfied: setuptools in /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages (from ansible==2.7.10) (40.8.0)
Requirement already satisfied: markupsafe in /usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages (from jinja2->ansible==2.7.10) (0.11)
Requirement already satisfied: pyasn1>=0.1.7 in /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages (from paramiko->ansible==2.7.10) (0.4.5)
Requirement already satisfied: idna>=2.1 in /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages (from cryptography->ansible==2.7.10) (2.7)
Requirement already satisfied: enum34; python_version < "3" in /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages (from cryptography->ansible==2.7.10) (1.1.6)
Requirement already satisfied: six>=1.4.1 in /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages (from cryptography->ansible==2.7.10) (1.10.0)
Requirement already satisfied: cffi!=1.11.3,>=1.7 in /usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages (from cryptography->ansible==2.7.10) (1.11.5)
Requirement already satisfied: asn1crypto>=0.21.0 in /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages (from cryptography->ansible==2.7.10) (0.24.0)
Requirement already satisfied: ipaddress; python_version < "3" in /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages (from cryptography->ansible==2.7.10) (1.0.22)
Requirement already satisfied: pycparser in /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages (from cffi!=1.11.3,>=1.7->cryptography->ansible==2.7.10) (2.19)
Building wheels for collected packages: ansible
  Building wheel for ansible (setup.py) ... done
  Stored in directory: /root/.cache/pip/wheels/b1/87/37/8f982acaa4fd348505aa36789e2273ee362dbce98716d14cba
Successfully built ansible
Installing collected packages: ansible
  Found existing installation: ansible 2.8.0
    Uninstalling ansible-2.8.0:
      Successfully uninstalled ansible-2.8.0
Successfully installed ansible-2.7.10
You are using pip version 19.0.3, however version 19.1.1 is available.
You should consider upgrading via the 'pip install --upgrade pip' command.
[root@ansible-server ~]# 

If you get the SSL certificate error like below, use trusted flag.
Retrying (Retry(total=4, connect=None, read=None, redirect=None, status=None)) after connection broken by ‘SSLError(SSLError(1, ‘[SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed (_ssl.c:600)’),)’:
Here is the command with the trusted flag to overcome the above error.

[root@ansible-server ~]# pip install --trusted-host files.pythonhosted.org --trusted-host pypi.org --trusted-host pypi.python.org ansible==2.7.10

 

4. Check the ansible engine version again.

[root@ansible-server ~]# ansible --version
ansible 2.7.10
  config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
  configured module search path = [u'/root/.ansible/plugins/modules', u'/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
  ansible python module location = /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/ansible
  executable location = /usr/bin/ansible
  python version = 2.7.5 (default, Apr 11 2018, 07:36:10) [GCC 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-28)]
[root@ansible-server ~]#

We have successfully downgraded the ansible engine from 2.8 to 2.7 using pip (Pip Installs Packages).