Fixing 'UNREACHABLE' SSH error when running Ansible playbooks ag...

Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 (and likely future versions) often don't have Python 2 installed by default. Sometimes Python 3 is installed, available at /usr/bin/python3 , but for many minimal images I've used, there's no preinstalled Python at all.

Therefore, when you run Ansible playbooks against new VMs running Ubuntu, you might be greeted with the following error:

TASK [Gathering Facts] *************************************************************************************************
fatal: [example.com]: UNREACHABLE! => {"changed": false, "msg": "SSH Error: data could not be sent to remote host "example.com". Make sure this host can be reached over ssh", "unreachable": true}

It's easy enough to work around this problem, though! If you have the ability to build your own base images (e.g. AMIs on AWS), you can just make sure /usr/bin/python is already installed on the image. And if only python3 is present, you can set ansible_python_interpreter=/usr/bin/python3 in your inventory for the affected hosts. If you can't do either of these things, the best way is to:

gather_facts
raw
setup

Here's a scaffold playbook I usually use on any Ubuntu 16 or 18 hosts:

---
- hosts: all
  gather_facts: no

  pre_tasks:
    - name: Install Python if not already present.
      raw: test -e /usr/bin/python || (apt -y update && apt install -y python-minimal)
      changed_when: False

    - name: Gather facts after Python is definitely present.
      setup:

  roles:
    ...

This way, you'll still have access to host facts, and you won't get cryptic errors about Ansible not being able to connect to the host via SSH.