# (Developers) An update on Ansible Commander progress **URL:** \ **Category:** Ansible Project\ **Created:** [March 24, 2013, 8:32pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/developers-an-update-on-ansible-commander-progress/12571 "2013-03-24T20:32:30Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/da6949/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan2](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan2)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2013, 8:32pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/developers-an-update-on-ansible-commander-progress/12571/1 "2013-03-24T20:32:30Z")
HI everyone, I wanted to share a quick update on Ansible Commander - [https://github.com/ansible/ansible-commander/](https://github.com/ansible/ansible-commander/). For those not familiar, Ansible Commander's goal is to be an optional REST API and GUI on top of Ansible, to make things easier and also provide a lot of ability to drill down into Ansible data. The ansible project will never require commander, but it will be easy to install if you want to drive Ansible though a web interface. When using commander, playbooks will still be kept in git, so it won't lock you in to just using the GUI, or anything like that. So, update... I've been working on Ansible Commander a lot in the last week or so and wanted to share a quick update about how it was being built so that people will be able to help with development later, and understand what we are doing. Pretty much everything so far has been about the REST API. If you are not a Python developer or someone with a deep-ceded interest in REST APIs, this is probably not going to make a lot of sense, and that's ok. You'll have a nice interface in the near future and won't need to understand \*ANY\* of this. So, if you want to read on at your own risk, interested parties should probably start here with this skeleton of the API guide: [https://github.com/ansible/ansible-commander/blob/master/docs/api\_guide.md](https://github.com/ansible/ansible-commander/blob/master/docs/api_guide.md) In the API guide, currently there are two major services that are available -- Organizations and Users. Organizations are the basic unit of multi-tenancy in Ansbile Commander, and would be things like "Engineering" and "Finance". Sharing across organizations is possible, but organization admins have power to do things to users in organizations, and not users in /other/ organizations. Basically org admins are almost gods, so you don't want to assign this to everyone -- they can mark users in their organization as deleted, for instance. Users are pretty obvious -- and they can belong to organizations as regular people or as admins. They can login and change their passwords. Stuff like that. The next steps are to build out the API for inventory editing via web interfaces, which should be more or less immediately usable once complete -- even if you ignore the user/organization stuff. Once that (inventory) is done, we'll be building out concepts of Projects and Teams and Credentials, and the somewhat involved RBAC system that will allow users on projects and teams to be able to do certain things and not other things. There are also already some basic hooks for being able to run a playbook via the Celery API (a python task engine) but you will need to setup inventory using Django Admin (a built in admin GUI in Django) until there is an accompanying REST way to do it. I don't recommend folks try this as it will evolve some, but it's there! There will also be some guts added soon to allow different credentials to be used, and the celery system will probably know how to work ssh-agent for you, and things like that. Initially it might require unlocked keys in the first release, but I suspect it won't. Another thing is that the inventory source is decoupled from the rest of Commander, so if you want to just use commander to edit inventory and not launch jobs, that should be doable pretty quick. Given dynamic inventory is also very useful, I imagine what will happen is Ansible Commander will have a way to sync with ansible inventory scripts, or there will be a flag on the inventory object that says "external" where you can specify an inventory script (or directory) instead of the built in API based inventory. Note: this is of current interest to developers of Python applications and those folks who develop against REST APIs. It is not ready for us yet and you should not try to use it. Python developers should be grok this a bit better by looking at the tests: [https://github.com/ansible/ansible-commander/tree/master/lib/main/tests](https://github.com/ansible/ansible-commander/tree/master/lib/main/tests) And the guts of the code are the files in the root of this directory: [https://github.com/ansible/ansible-commander/tree/master/lib/main](https://github.com/ansible/ansible-commander/tree/master/lib/main) We are using Django-rest-framework to do a good chunk of the heavy lifting. As you can see, a lof the work here has gone into the basic framework and the need to have a lot of control over user access. Further notes: Ansible Commander is not in a state where anyone should be using it yet, and I reserve the right to completely rebuild the database migrations at any time. You are also advised to test it only on a stand alone machine, as right now, it will template over your PostgreSQL access control configuration. Ansible Commander is of course set up by an Ansible playbook. To read more about this, see "SETUP.md" in the source checkout, and also take a look at the Makefile for how to initiate various Django operations. ---
**Author:** ![Kavin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ba8739/32.png) [@Kavin](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Kavin)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2013, 11:17pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/developers-an-update-on-ansible-commander-progress/12571/2 "2013-03-24T23:17:15Z")
This is Good. One question: Would something like this be in-scope for Ansible commander ? 1. Creating playbooks, tieing various tasks to create a new ad-hoc playbook/tasks. From the UI? Regards,– Kavin Kankeshwar ---
**Author:** ![mujahideen.solutions](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/13edae/32.png) [@mujahideen.solutions](https://forum.ansible.com/u/mujahideen.solutions)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2013, 11:26pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/developers-an-update-on-ansible-commander-progress/12571/3 "2013-03-24T23:26:51Z")
Anybody interested in a OpenVPN module? The scripts (easy-rsa) annoy me. ---
**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c4cdca/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2013, 11:48pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/developers-an-update-on-ansible-commander-progress/12571/4 "2013-03-24T23:48:32Z")
Absolutely! The ultimate goal is to make it so that, while you can do everything with the CLI, you can also do everything \*without\* the CLI. The initial release will probably not allow you to create playbooks via the API, but it will be possible in the very near future. --Michael ---
**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/da6949/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan2](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan2)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2013, 1:01pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/developers-an-update-on-ansible-commander-progress/12571/5 "2013-03-25T13:01:13Z")
Could be interesting. I think the trick is finding out if it should be a module or a playbook. What kind of parameters would the module have? ---
**Author:** ![mujahideen.solutions](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/13edae/32.png) [@mujahideen.solutions](https://forum.ansible.com/u/mujahideen.solutions)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2013, 2:15pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/developers-an-update-on-ansible-commander-progress/12571/6 "2013-03-25T14:15:22Z")
The easy-rsa directory is full of bash scripts that help generate the SSL keys/certs. I may just make it a SSL module instead, as most of it can already be handled by ansible. Or maybe I should do a key handling module. Ultimately I don’t want to use those brittle bash scripts. ---
**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/da6949/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan2](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan2)\ **Post date:** [June 2, 2013, 12:28pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/developers-an-update-on-ansible-commander-progress/12571/7 "2013-06-02T12:28:38Z")
All answered on this thread: [https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!searchin/ansible-project/commander/ansible-project/9UbCvDIgHRY/nENVlUHuTcgJ](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!searchin/ansible-project/commander/ansible-project/9UbCvDIgHRY/nENVlUHuTcgJ) FWIW, we’re now just referring to this as solution “AnsibleWorks Suite”. While there may not be a public beta,we’ll announce some more details and updates at AnsibleFest, and you’ll still get that demo! –Michael