Add pipx alternative for deps installation

[dxmann73]

SUMMARY

After many struggles to get the azure collection installed on Ubuntu, I have finally figured out how to use pipx. It has helped me a lot and I'd llike to add it to the docs.

ISSUE TYPE

• Docs Pull Request

[Fred-sun]

@dxmann73 This only installs these dependencies in the isolated virtual environment ansible, but how do we call these dependencies when we run the script? Can you describe it here? Thank you!

[dxmann73]

I did this actually to work around an issue I had working with the Azure collection on my machine (Ubuntu)

First, following https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/installation_guide/intro_installation.html#installing-and-upgrading-ansible-with-pipx

sudo apt install pipx
pipx ensurepath
source ~/.bashrc
pipx install --include-deps ansible

With ansible --version showing it was correctly installed, following https://galaxy.ansible.com/ui/repo/published/azure/azcollection/docs/ I did

ansible-galaxy collection list | grep azure

and saw it was showing up 2x times. If it hadn't been there I would have done (and tried)

ansible-galaxy collection install azure.azcollection --force

But that didn't change much. Because when trying to work with the Azure collection (as user traefik-vm-adm), I got the following error

ansible localhost -m azure.azcollection.azure_rm_resourcegroup -a "name=foo location=swedencentral"

[WARNING]: No inventory was parsed, only implicit localhost is available
An exception occurred during task execution. To see the full traceback, use -vvv. The error was: ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'azure.mgmt'
localhost | FAILED! => {
    "changed": false,
    "msg": "Failed to import the required Python library (ansible[azure] (azure >= 2.0.0)) on staging-traefik-vm's Python /home/traefik-vm-adm/.local/share/pipx/venvs/ansible/bin/python. Please read the module documentation and install it in the appropriate location. If the required library is installed, but Ansible is using the wrong Python interpreter, please consult the documentation on ansible_python_interpreter"
}

To resolve the error, I tried to pipx inject ansible azure which failed with a message saying the azure module is deprecated starting with version 5.0.0

So what I did was install the dependencies

pipx runpip ansible install -r ~/.ansible/collections/ansible_collections/azure/azcollection/requirements.txt

and make sure the azure package was there with

ll ~/.local/share/pipx/venvs/ansible/lib/python3.12/site-packages | grep azure

I don't remember exactly if it worked then and there, I may have injected azure v4 as well using

pipx inject ansible azure==4.0.0

Being new to Python it took a considerable amount of time to actually figure all this out to make it work. So I figured at least the pipx runpip part should go into the docs.

Cheers
Dave

[dxmann73]

Side note: Many docs say to install stuff just using pip. Ubuntu does not have pip and when you try to install anything with it, it will complain that it will break the system if you do so, talking about managed environments or somesuch and being kinda vague about what the options are. So I feel like more docs should actually mention that.