Getting started

Requirements

  • Any recent Linux distribution or Mac OS with python >=3.5 available
  • The ara Ansible plugins must be installed for the same python interpreter as Ansible itself

Note

For RHEL 7 and CentOS 7 it is recommended to run the API server in a container due to missing or outdated dependencies. See this issue for more information.

Recording playbooks without an API server

The default API client, offline, requires API server dependencies to be installed but does not need the API server to be running in order to query or send data.

With defaults and using a local sqlite database:

# Install Ansible and ARA (with API server dependencies) for the current user
python3 -m pip install --user ansible "ara[server]"

# Configure Ansible to use the ARA callback plugin
export ANSIBLE_CALLBACK_PLUGINS="$(python3 -m ara.setup.callback_plugins)"

# Run an Ansible playbook
ansible-playbook playbook.yaml

# Use the CLI to see recorded playbooks
ara playbook list

# Start the built-in development server to browse recorded results
ara-manage runserver

Recording playbooks with an API server

When running Ansible from multiple servers or locations, data can be aggregated by running the API server as a service and configuring the ARA Ansible callback plugin to use the http API client with the API server endpoint.

The API server is a relatively simple django web application written in python that can run with WSGI application servers such as gunicorn, uwsgi or mod_wsgi.

Alternatively, the API server can also run from a container image such as the one available on DockerHub:

# Create a directory for a volume to store settings and a sqlite database
mkdir -p ~/.ara/server

# Start an API server with podman from the image on DockerHub:
podman run --name api-server --detach --tty \
  --volume ~/.ara/server:/opt/ara:z -p 8000:8000 \
  docker.io/recordsansible/ara-api:latest

# or with docker:
docker run --name api-server --detach --tty \
  --volume ~/.ara/server:/opt/ara:z -p 8000:8000 \
  docker.io/recordsansible/ara-api:latest

Once the server is running, Ansible playbook results can be sent to it by configuring the ARA callback plugin:

# Install Ansible and ARA (without API server dependencies) for the current user
python3 -m pip install --user ansible ara

# Configure Ansible to use the ARA callback plugin
export ANSIBLE_CALLBACK_PLUGINS="$(python3 -m ara.setup.callback_plugins)"

# Set up the ARA callback to know where the API server is located
export ARA_API_CLIENT="http"
export ARA_API_SERVER="http://127.0.0.1:8000"

# Run an Ansible playbook
ansible-playbook playbook.yaml

# Use the CLI to see recorded playbooks
ara playbook list

Data will be available on the API server in real time as the playbook progresses and completes.

Read more about how container images are built and how to run them here.

Installing from source

ara can be installed from source in order to preview and test unreleased features and improvements:

# Without the API server dependencies
pip install --user git+https://github.com/ansible-community/ara

# With the API server dependencies
# (Extras suffixes don't work when supplying the direct git URL)
git clone https://github.com/ansible-community/ara /tmp/ara-src
pip install --user "/tmp/ara-src[server]"

Installing from distribution packages

ara is fully packaged for Fedora, OpenSUSE as well as Debian.

There is also a package without the API server available on RHEL 8/CentOS 8 EPEL. This package contains the Ansible plugins as well as the API clients which are sufficient to query or send data to a remote API server.

Installing with Ansible roles

A collection of Ansible roles for deploying a production-ready ara API server is available on Ansible Galaxy.

For more information as well as documentation, see the collection GitHub repository: https://github.com/ansible-community/ara-collection/