TL;DR: Install aptitude first

Typically, the first thing I do when provisioning a VM is upgrade all the installed packages. In Bash on Ubuntu, this would mean running the apt-get upgrade dance. In Ansible, it’s this:

- apt: cache_valid_time=3600 update_cache=yes upgrade=yes

If you do this, you’ll probably see this error message:

ansible could not find aptitude. please ensure it is installed

I thought I was stuck in a catch-22, but it’s actually not a problem. The apt module in ansible uses aptitude for bulk upgrades, everything else uses apt-get.

The solution: Use the apt module to install aptitude before running the upgrade.

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