I have configured Ansible Automation Platform, and want to give users access to the web interface.
I want users to be able to write their own playbooks, in their own projects!
Is this possible? Or will I need to give them access to the ‘awx’ users credentials and then they will be writing their playbooks in the command line? Is there a way to write playbooks from the web interface?
Thank you!
you don’t need to rely on the command line to write playbooks, that is pretty hard actually, just us an editor
AAP includes ansible-devtools, which includes a vscode plugin, for the vscode editor (also works on vscodium).
There currently is no ‘official’ web UI tool to write playbooks.
AAP (the awx/Controller component) can pull playbooks from a git repo, no matter how you authored them. Authors and users have no need to access the command line of the AAP server.
Oh wow, apparently, I am a caveman over here editing playbooks at the command line. Why didn’t I think of this, thank you we will use VS Code for this
I use vi for my playbooks, was hinting on doing sed/tr and other commands on file as ‘editing from the command line’. But most people will find vscode + ansible plugin as a big help (vim can also use the lsp, but slightly harder to setup).
Exactly.
We have a similar setup with VIM + ALE, using ansible-lint, which makes playbook/role/etc editing much nicer.
If you are going to be working on the command line (TUI) for editing Ansible playbooks, a bonus is to containerize your Ansible deployments.
All EE’s you want in AAP can be pulled in via Podman/Docker on the CLI and you can write a wrapper to call, say, ansible-lint which can be used in VIM + ALE. That is, in addition to your standard ansible{,-*} commands.
That way, you are testing with container images (EEs) on the CLI in the same way you would in AWX.
You can also use ansible-runner or ansible-navigator for additional means to run those EEs instead of using wrappers to Podman/Docker.