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Installation

Installing LSO in a virtual environment is highly recommended, and there are multiple options available for this.

Virtual Environments

Virtual Envirionments are highly recommended for Python packages as described in PEP 405, PEP 668, and PEP 704. While not all of these standards are active, their motivations still hold. For example:

PEP 668

“A long-standing practical problem for Python users has been conflicts between OS package managers and Python-specific package management tools like pip. These conflicts include both Python-level API incompatibilities and conflicts over file ownership.“

The LSO project uses uv for development, and it behaves similarly to pip.

To install LSO in your uv virtual environment, use:

uv init
uv add orchestrator-lso==5.0.0

Installing Ansible

LSO does not install Ansible, and does not require a particular version of it. Ansible is central to what LSO does, so it has to be present, but which version to run is your decision: your playbooks and collections dictate that, not LSO.

LSO calls Ansible through the ansible-playbook and ansible-inventory commands and imports no Ansible code, so any reasonably recent release works. The test suite is run against ansible-core 2.16 through to the latest release.

Install it whichever way suits your deployment, as long as the commands end up on the same PATH as LSO:

uv add ansible==14.2.0          # alongside LSO in the same virtual environment
pip install ansible==14.2.0     # or with pip
apt-get install ansible         # or from your distribution's packages

Ansible has to be on the PATH of the LSO process

LSO looks the commands up on the PATH of the process it runs in, so Ansible does not have to live in the same virtual environment as LSO. Installing it system-wide works, because the commands run under their own interpreter.

What does break is a process whose PATH is narrower than your shell’s. A systemd unit is the usual culprit: unless PATH is set in the unit file, it defaults to a minimal one that omits /usr/local/bin and any virtual environment. LSO then answers validator_unavailable when an inventory is submitted, even though Ansible runs perfectly from your shell.

Check that the LSO process, not just your shell, can find it:

ansible-playbook --version
ansible-inventory --version