🪟 Provisioning Windows from WSL

I found this to be very difficult since most tutorials online just install ansible in WSL, and do not include provisioning the host Windows OS through WSL. Eventually I found this post: https://landy.dev/2020/12/01/managing-windows-hosts-with-ansible/ which shows how to get ansible working through SSH, which is much easier than using WinRM.

Once I got SSH installed and setup to use ed25519 keys (see: SSH) things were quite simple.

I created an entry in my ssh config for accessing the Windows host, and used that in my inventory.yml file:

---
all:
  hosts:
    my_windows_server:
      ansible_shell_type: cmd
      ansible_host: win
      ansible_user: erick

Then I was able to run a test command using:

ansible -i inventory.yml -m win_ping my_windows_server

Which produced the following output:

my_windows_server | SUCCESS => {
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}