It is assumed that you have Ansible installed on your system. There are many documents out there that cover installing Ansible in a way that is appropriate to the operating system and version that you might be using. This book will assume use of Ansible version 2.7.x.x. To discover the version in use on a system where Ansible is already installed, make use of the version argument, that is, either ansible or ansible-playbook, as follows:

ansible-playbook --version

This command should give you an output that's similar to the following screenshot:

The configuration for Ansible can exist in a few different locations, where the first file found will be used. The search involves the following:

• ANSIBLE_CFG: This environment variable is used, provided it is set
• ansible.cfg: This is located in the current directory
• ~/.ansible.cfg: This is located in the user's home directory 
• /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg

Some installation methods may include placing a config file in one of these locations. Look around to check whether such a file exists and see what settings are in the file to get an idea of how Ansible operation may be affected. This book will assume that there are no settings in the ansible.cfg file that would affect the default operation of Ansible.