ansible tower_project module, always getting "ansible-tower-cli required for this module"

Question

I have a control host that has the following:

• ansible --version = 2.5.2
• tower-cli --version == 3.3.0

tower-cli is able to connect to a remote Ansible Tower instance (note, Ansible tower itself is not installed on this control host). Can run 'tower-cli user list' on control host and works as expected.

However, when I try to use a playbook with the tower_* modules, such as:

  tasks:
  - name: create the SCM project
    tower_project:
      name: "test project"
      state: present
      ...

Always getting the following:

ansible-tower-cli required for this module

Any ideas, as I can use tower-cli just fine on this localhost that is running the playbook.

Answer 1

Found the origin of the issue, and unless someone else had run into it they wouldn't have known where to look --

check details of tower-cli --version and ansible --version, as well as which tower-cli which ansible; in my case were installed in different python environments:

/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/ansible

/usr/lib/python3.4/site-packages/tower_cli

If you cannot see the python version using the above for tower-cli, you can run:

$ head -n1 `which tower-cli`
#!/usr/local/opt/python/bin/python3.7
$ 

The ansible modules couldn't see the tower_cli python modules as they were in a different python environment.

After-the-fact problem origin: I had installed ansible via yum (package manager), and ansible-tower-cli via pip (python installer). Being consistent in how you install both to make sure they go to the same environment resolves the issue.

Centos/RHEL: yum install ansible ansible-tower-cli

-OR-

Python: pip install ansible

Python: pip install ansible-tower-cli