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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 powerful 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