Unexpected Exception: name 'basestring' is not defined when invoking ansible2

Question

I'm trying to execute ansible2 commnads...

When I do:

ansible-playbook -vvv -i my/inventory my/playbook.yml

I get:

Unexpected Exception: name 'basestring' is not defined the full traceback was:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/ansible-playbook", line 85, in <module>
    sys.exit(cli.run())
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/site-packages/ansible/cli/playbook.py", line 150, in run
    results = pbex.run()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/site-packages/ansible/executor/playbook_executor.py", line 87, in run
    self._tqm.load_callbacks()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/site-packages/ansible/executor/task_queue_manager.py", line 149, in load_callbacks
    elif isinstance(self._stdout_callback, basestring):
NameError: name 'basestring' is not defined

Here is ansible --version:

ansible 2.0.0.2
  config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
  configured module search path = Default w/o overrides

And here is python --version

Python 3.4.3

Answer 1

Ansible below version 2.5 requires Python 2.6 or 2.7 on the control host: Control Node Requirements

basestring is no longer available in Python 3. From What’s New In Python 3.0:

The builtin basestring abstract type was removed. Use str instead. The str and bytes types don’t have functionality enough in common to warrant a shared base class. The 2to3 tool (see below) replaces every occurrence of basestring with str.

So the solution is to either upgrade Ansible or downgrade Python.