Skip to content

AAP Installation

Tip

Currently (Q2 2026), three different methods to install AAP are available:

  1. RPM (on RHEL)
  2. Containerized (with Podman on RHEL)
  3. Operator (on RedHat OpenShift)

The RPM-based method is deprecated, use the Containerized method (or Operator).

To plan the Automation Platform installation refer to the Red Hat documentation!
The following shows examples from a containerized installation.

The containerized inventory growth topology installs all the components and services on a single machine, whereas the containerized enterprise topology splits these components and services across multiple machines.

The Ansible Automation Platform is installed (on RHEL) via Ansible, it requires an inventory file which differs slightly for RPM and containerized installation

RPM variable Container variable Description
node_type receptor_type The type of controller node (control or hybrid) or the type of execution node (execution or hop)
peers receptor_peers The list of node peers
Installation inventory example

The following shows an excerpt of the installation inventory for containers on multiple hosts:

[automationcontroller]
controller.example.com
controller2.example.com

[automationcontroller:vars]
receptor_type=control
receptor_peers=[]

[execution_nodes]
exec1.example.com
exec2.example.com
exec3.example.com
hop1.example.com

[local_nodes]
exec1.example.com
exec2.example.com

[local_nodes:vars]
receptor_peers=["controller.example.com","controller2.example.com"]

[remote_nodes]
exec3.example.com

[remote_nodes:vars]
receptor_peers=["hop1.example.com"]

[hop_nodes]
hop1.example.com

[hop_nodes:vars]
receptor_type=hop
receptor_peers=["controller.example.com","controller2.example.com"]

The installer fails if the inventory file is misconfigured and will stop during its initial validation checks if it finds errors related to automation mesh, some errors might take several minutes before they eventually cause an installation failure:

  • Hosts cannot belong to both the automationcontroller and execution_nodes host groups.
  • A host cannot peer to a node that does not exist.
  • A host cannot peer to itself.
  • A host cannot have an inbound and an outbound connection to the same nodes.
  • The receptor_peers variable cannot use a host group name and must provide a list of peers, even if that list only contains one peer.

Run the installation playbook:

ansible-playbook ansible.containerized_installer.install