The Vagrant Ansible Local provisioner allows you to provision the guest using [Ansible](http://ansible.com) playbooks by executing **`ansible-playbook` directly on the guest machine**.
The main advantage of the Ansible Local provisioner in comparison to the [Ansible (remote) provisioner](/docs/provisioning/ansible.html) is that it does not require any additional software on your Vagrant host.
On the other hand, [Ansible must obviously be installed](https://docs.ansible.com/intro_installation.html#installing-the-control-machine) on your guest machine(s).
**Note:** By default, Vagrant will *try* to automatically install Ansible if it is not yet present on the guest machine (see the `install` option below for more details).
This page only documents the specific parts of the `ansible_local` provisioner. General Ansible concepts like Playbook or Inventory are shortly explained in the [introduction to Ansible and Vagrant](/docs/provisioning/ansible_intro.html).
The Ansible Local provisioner requires that all the Ansible Playbook files are available on the guest machine, at the location referred by the `provisioning_path` option. Usually these files are initially present on the host machine (as part of your Vagrant project), and it is quite easy to share them with a Vagrant [Synced Folder](/docs/synced-folders/).
This section lists the specific options for the Ansible Local provisioner. In addition to the options listed below, this provisioner supports the [common options for both Ansible provisioners](/docs/provisioning/ansible_common.html).
**Attention:** There is no guarantee that this automated installation will replace a custom Ansible setup, that might be already present on the Vagrant box.
-`install_mode` (`:default` or `:pip`) - Select the way to automatically install Ansible on the guest system.
-`:default`: Ansible is installed from the operating system package manager. This mode doesn't support `version` selection. For many platforms (e.g Debian, FreeBSD, OpenSUSE) the official package repository is used, except for the following Linux distributions:
- On Ubuntu-like systems, the latest Ansible release is installed from the `ppa:ansible/ansible` repository.
- On RedHat-like systems, the latest Ansible release is installed from the [EPEL](http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL) repository.
-`:pip`: Ansible is installed from [PyPI](https://pypi.python.org/pypi) with [pip](https://pip.pypa.io) package installer. With this mode, Vagrant will systematically try to [install the latest pip version](https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/installing/#installing-with-get-pip-py). The `:pip` mode can install a specific version of Ansible if such information is specified with the `version` option described below.
The default value is `:default`, and any invalid value for this option will silently fall back to the default value.
-`provisioning_path` (string) - An absolute path on the guest machine where the Ansible files are stored. The `ansible-galaxy` and `ansible-playbook` commands are executed from this directory. This is the location to place an [ansible.cfg](http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/intro_configuration.html) file, in case you need it.
When an Ansible version is defined (e.g. `"1.8.2"`), the Ansible local provisioner will be executed only if Ansible is installed at the requested version.
**Warning:** It is currently possible to use this option to specify which version of Ansible must be automatically installed, but only in combination with the `install_mode` set to `:pip`.
With the following configuration pattern, you can install and execute Ansible only on a single guest machine (the `"controller"`) to provision all your machines.
And finally, you also have to create an [`ansible.cfg` file](https://docs.ansible.com/intro_configuration.html#openssh-specific-settings) to fully disable SSH host key checking. More SSH configurations can be added to the `ssh_args` parameter (e.g. agent forwarding, etc.)
