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Ansible GUI?

🌐 GUI for Ansible: AWX, Semaphore and others

In larger environments, you need something more than ansible-playbook. There are several tools that add a graphical interface, user management, task scheduling, and much more. Here's an overview of the most popular solutions I have or had the pleasure to work with and those I know less about:

Automation through API

The described tools have an API interface, so you can configure them to execute triggers, for example when someone:

  • buys a product in your store
  • places an order
  • changes their service parameters
  • and many other scenarios

AWX / Ansible Tower

AWX is the open-source counterpart of Ansible Tower – Red Hat's commercial product.

What does AWX offer?

  • web interface for running playbooks
  • RBAC (Role-Based Access Control)
  • task scheduling
  • dynamic inventory
  • task history and logs
  • REST API for integration with other tools

Installation

Recent AWX versions offer Kubernetes-based installation. Ansible Tower offers simple installation, even on a single host, and you can easily add more machines as load balancers. The only downside is AT's price 😅

📎 Link: https://github.com/ansible/awx

SemaphoreUI

Light and fast GUI interface for Ansible, perfect for smaller teams or environments.

Semaphore features:

  • simple web interface
  • user authorization
  • git integration
  • task history and logs
  • REST API

Plus: very easy installation (binary + database) or Docker

📎 Link: https://github.com/ansible-semaphore/semaphore

Rundeck

General-purpose IT operations automation tool – can work with Ansible in the background.

Rundeck features:

  • UI for automation tasks
  • integration with Ansible as backend
  • task execution history
  • user permissions and access
  • manual and automatic task execution

📎 Link: https://www.rundeck.com/open-source

Jenkins + Ansible

Jenkins not just for CI/CD - with plugins can be a good frontend for Ansible.

Typical scenario:

  • pull playbooks from Git
  • automatic inventory
  • run playbooks as pipeline steps
  • reports and integrations

📎 Link: https://www.jenkins.io/

🔚 Summary

Tool WebUI RBAC Git integration API Scheduler
AWX/Tower ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
Semaphore ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
Rundeck ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
Jenkins ✅ 🟡 ✅ ✅ ✅

Tool choice depends on your needs:

  • small environments? ➡️ Semaphore
  • enterprise? ➡️ AWX/Tower
  • already have Jenkins? ➡️ Use it with Ansible