This web UI for Ansible is so damn useful!

Ansible Semaphore is the perfect tool for automating your servers, applications, and clean up tasks with Ansible Playbooks. In this video, I'll quickly show you how to install it and some of the things you can do with it. If you're new to Ansible, I recommend checking out some of my older videos first to get some foundational knowledge. Let's get started automating your Homelab with Ansible Semaphore! #Ansible #Homelab #Automation
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Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction
00:47 - Advertisement-*
01:33 - Install Ansible-Semaphore
04:09 - How I'm using it in my Homelab
07:51 - How to set up Ansible-Semaphore
13:52 - Set up Task Templates
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[@JonathanMarocco]

as always, ever so informative and aspiring for us, homelab admins... Thanks, Chris. Keep up the great work 👍

[@stone22121978]

Deine Videos und deine Arbeit liefern so viel Mehrwert. DANKE CHRISTIAN !

[@csgrullon]

Excellent video. As you mentioned, it would be nice to have a video about GIT and the differences between github and gitlab, also selfhosted options like gitea. So far your content is rock solid and already a source of knowledge that i use for reference on my homelab adventures.

[@davidkamaunu7887]

Awesomeness! Thanks for the very useful presentation Christian. Ansible is so powerful and useful.

[@DanielRolfe]

This is something that’s been on my “to look into” list for about a year now , thanks for the video

[@mistakek]

Thanks for this. I stumbled upon this the other week and was something I wanted to setup, and hoped would be easier to use ansible with. Also a big yes please to a nice git tutorial, that would be fantastic.

[@johnjbateman]

I have been putting off Anisble. Until now. Thanks Christian!

[@aceisastud]

Seems almost like an AWX/Ansible Tower light version. Nice video as always. Thanks for all you do for us!

[@tomstechnews]

Great vid. Thank you. Exactly what I was searching for! A github tutorial vid would be very helpful for homelab networkers, engineers and hobby it-fans!

[@billramsey5252]

Great video as always! And YES. I would LOVE a GIT tutorial. I still have not fully wrapped my head around that!

[@kgottsman]

This is exactly what I have been looking for... Now my week is booked for Ansible.

[@PaulLittlefield]

Great video Christian, I’m installing this tomorrow!

[@hitechredneck6366]

Thanks for the demo/review of Semaphore. Have heard of it, but not used it. Will have to give it a look for home use. It does appear to be something of AWX-lite.

[@alifiroozizamani7782]

Awesome video as usual. Thank you Chris🍻

[@VINII971]

Thank you Christian your work is really appreciated.

[@benjaminshtark5977]

i used this about 6 years ago in its very early beta-alpha version :D nice to see it matured so much..

[@h3ct0rjs]

Thank you, this was useful. I don't use too much UIs but this is really cool.

[@chrisumali9841]

thanks for the demo and update, have a great day

[@legooos]

Wonderful, this video is just as I got into Ansible. I would really love a video on Git with specifics for the Ops guys, how does it improve the usual processes

[@lucamotterle]

I’m using it from the last year. Great tool for sysadmins and devops teams 👍

[@TravisNewton1]

Thank you for sharing this! For awhile, I was using AWX and then switched to Rundeck when AWX moved to requiring k8s. But while Rundeck is great and I love it, it's a little overkill. This fits the bill perfectly!

[@Bver69]

I have been running semaphore for over a year and it’s been rock solid in terms of executing scheduled tasks and it’s very light weight. However it has a few annoying bugs that haven’t been fixed that impact me so I’m actually evaluating rundeck. I also like that rundeck can do more than just ansible but hate that it uses Java and takes 2 GB of memory out of the box with no tasks running. That’s like 4x the memory of my next most memory hungry container. It feels bulky to run in docker which is a shame.

[@horst.zimmermann]

Thank you for this video. I am currently running ubuntu on my servers and managing updates with canonical landscape. This is exactly what i searched for because i am moving my servers from ubuntu to debian and needed an easy tool to automate my updates and some other tasks. As always a verry good and informative video. Vielen Dank

[@christianlempa]

Thank you so much! I'm glad you enjoyed watching it :)

[@emdlv]

Hi Chris... YES absolutely... We all would LOVE you do a tutorial on GIT... Please !!!

[@chrisgrigor1234]

Great video. I have used AWX (Ansible Tower open source) and also Rundeck as Ansible controllers before. All are great and have good features, but this looks very cool! Thanks for sharing Christian, I will try out for my home setup.

[@KristianKirilov]

Sorry just wondering why you need both of them? AWX is not able to act as a controller?

[@alakhniranjan716]

Sir, I am novice here what is your experience with AWX vs RunDeck vs this tool Semaphore?

[@chrisgrigor1234]

@@KristianKirilov Why do you need both? Because Rundeck is more than just a workflow tool, I use it to build AMI's, create infrastructure with Terraform, docker builds and anything that an admin can do I automate it, that's why.

[@zombievaliste]

That's a good idea the Git Video! Thanks for this tutorial, I'm gonna use this at my job ahah!

[@cristobalgonzalez2959]

Thank U master…. I appreciate your videos 🎉🎉🎉

[@easternpa2]

What a great video, I love it. Not sure if someone covered it already, but the demo at the end referred to UPDATING the apt packages, but it actually UPGRADED them. Big difference in the apt world. One is checking for available updates while the other is applying them. I was surprised when you checked on one of the servers and found that no upgrades were pending.

[@ritchie1950]

I've used Semaphore for almost a year now, it lack some docs and some functions but other than that it is a nice GUI for Ansible playbooks. Note that i use it at work in small scale (for now). The server is easy to install and maintain, friendly GUI, nice to have the Ansible code in a repository (otherwise people just hack in the terminal/manual work).

[@maxdiamond55]

Great video Chris, a Git video would also be great. Thanks

[@Saulimedes]

This was very useful. Thanks so much for sharing!

[@christianlempa]

Glad it was helpful!

[@hermesjrd]

As always you post great videos.. excellent app.. I will start to use it

[@7rich79]

Very nice. This could be a great way to help a team of sysadmins not having to worry too much about routine tasks. And yes, I would like to see a video on git. 😅

[@rasheed.a873]

Appreciate the info as always 🙏

[@zombrix9490]

Yes pleasee, I would really like a video on gitops explaining basic concepts (maybe with demos). Also Nomad, there aren't many videos about it

[@jamallmahmoudi9481]

Hi, Christian Unfortunately, since Red Hat has been taken over by IBM, it is no longer possible to use Red Hat products. Especially Ansible Tower, but this semaphore looks very good and has good features You also showed this in the best possible way Thank you very much🙏👌🙏👌💪

[@janvanveldhuizen_visma]

Great video, Christian! I have already automated most of my machines in my homelab with ansible. Mostly using ansible-pull in order to avoid the need of a central server that controls all the ansible playbooks. Because that's what puzzles me the most when thinking of tools like Semaphore: you need a machine to install it on, preferably using Docker, and you also mentioned that it is recommended to have it behind Traefik or Nginx. I fully agree. But that raises the chicken and egg question. I want every machine in my network to be controlled and configured by Ansible playbooks, including my reverse proxy, and even the Semaphore server itself 🤪

[@christianlempa]

Yeah that's a problem :D I think you should have the rev proxy already in place.

[@autohmae]

Well, you put the files on your laptop and deploy the server ones to install some git server, webserver, docker, ansible, etc. After that log into this and connect it to the same server and put the files in a repo and delete the old files from laptop.

[@user-ue4jf8fw3m]

Great video, I would also love to see a "Git for Sys Admins" type video!

[@373323]

awesome, will check it out soon.

[@somethingnew3338]

your channel is gold

[@nickolaizein7465]

Amazing! As always!

[@christianlempa]

Thanks again!

[@transatlant1c]

This project has come a long way in the last couple years

[@dirkmothes5136]

well done. great vid. go forward with automation ;-)

[@djfirestorm1993]

Hi Christian, vielen Dank für diese geile Software. Meinen heutigen Arbeitstag habe ich damit verbracht, alle scripte umzubauen und Semaphore zu pflegen. Jetzt darf meine Endlosliste in RoyalTSX verschwinden

[@christianlempa]

Vielen Dank für deinen Support! Freut mich sehr dass dir das Video auch auf der Arbeit weitergeholfen hat 😊🙏

[@kirksteinklauber260]

I like to understand better how git works!! Great video BTW!

[@Babbili]

8:04 "real IT guys should never work without Dark Mode" this is actually true 💯, i enjoy your videos more coz even the background behind you is dark 🌙

[@christianlempa]

Glad you enjoy it!

[@newallst]

Thanks Christian!

[@farshadnick]

Thanks alot Christian 🤞

[@chrisallen6010]

That T-Shirt is awesome

[@christianlempa]

Oh yeah, thanks :D It's indeed amazing

[@VovaJuice1992]

Great video! TY!

[@ThereWillBeCake]

Legend! Thanks for the video.

[@christianlempa]

Thanks :D

[@towesc]

Thanks for sharing, great stuff 👍👍. A github vid would be highly appreciated. As you mentioned it's not very intuitive learning all the different tasks and steps, at least for me.

[@nagisupercell]

This is so cool!

[@almircandidodepaula6828]

Nice video, I started use semaphone.

[@franck4690]

Hi, thank for the video! A video on how to deploy a self-hosted sentry would be great

[@williamevans6830]

New subscriber here absolutely love the content. Also I concur I work in IT and Dark mode is everywhere for me 😂

[@brunosolothurnmann9205]

A GIT tutorial would be very helpful. Had problems to integrate it with Ansible.

[@thedev2496]

Great video as always ! In a homelab setup, this is really great but in a professional context, the constraint of having the ansible binary on the semaphone server is so unfortunate. The flexibility to have a remote ansible runner is so much more powerfull and unlocks the ability to use different ansible versions. This is particularly useful when u have large teams that each maintain a bunch of playbooks and don't have the time or resources to all conform to a specific ansible version. Remote ansible runners also allows u to manage client infrastructure so much more easily.

[@christianlempa]

Thank you! I think the target group for Ansible Semaphore is really the small lightweight environment, where this might not be a big deal. But sure, that type of feature would be awesome.

[@Roflmane]

as of today you can use runners

[@SB-qm5wg]

That is really cool. TY

[@agusaris5031]

Now we need Web UI for Terraform

[@brentglover7333]

Great vid as always and informative. I have dabbled with ansible a few times and keep navigating back to command line. This is enough to roll one out again and see. Question - are your playbooks available on your GitHub anywhere? I love a good set of playbooks to beg, steal, borrow :)

[@matthewhutchman3050]

Great Video!!! Please do the Git video you mentioned. That would be a huge help!

[@AmitKumar-fn8px]

loveeeeddd itttt❤

[@kurapatikumar2296]

Very informative

[@christianlempa]

Thanks!

[@PaulBunkey]

+1 for Git video

[@NotADevOps]

You are a GOLD !!!

[@LampJustin]

While I like Semaphore I'm much more into AWX, I like it's Operator and its Kubernetes integration. It will spin up a new container for any playbook run. You can create custom runners with custom ansible galaxy roles and stuff, too. It's pretty slick.

[@Tethalion]

I worked out "git for sysadmins" the hard way by trial and error and pestering some of our developers when I got stuck but video resource to point new team members to would be amazing. You should do it :)

[@tommsla123]

Yes, I want this video about git

[@supriyosarkar5132]

It's basically Jenkins/Gitlab Pipeline focused only on Ansible. Change my mind!!!

[@cuneiformemx3563]

Yes but with Maintained software and no legacy and vulnerable code…

[@Rnqkoisi]

I would like to see a Git tutorial :) , great video.

Protip: make ansible-lint a habit. It will improve your playbooks and catch bugs early

[@badasmonk3y]

Hi Chris, great video. Would you be able to cover Ansible AWX? I think it would be beneficial for the community since that project is used more in enterprise setups than this. Anything else keep up the great work love the vids.

[@BenjaminArntzen]

AWX is also a total pain to host and use :)

[@ThePswiegers]

@@BenjaminArntzen 2% less pain on rancher .... lol

[@crackpippi]

@@ThePswiegers s/less/more/ 😞

[@Gilgwathir]

Not sure whether AWX/Tower is worth the trouble in a homelab. It's intended for environments where auditing, enforcement, privilege seperation etc. are a concern. In a homelab you are usually the only one making changes, you know who screwed up, if something is wrong. You are provisioning the hardware, the VMs and containers, you write the configs etc. Although I sometimes whish for it, but no tool can protect me from my own stupidity. There's no one arround who knows better and AWX doesn't change that. It does solve one problem though: in a sufficiently hardned environment you don't want to do all the admin work from your workstation. You'll want to do that from a jump host. AWX/Tower can be that jump host, but just SSHing into a small VM, pulling the latest versions of your playbooks and running them by hand is way simpler.

[@elrus0o]

@@BenjaminArntzen if you use the latest version of tower you can run with only one docker run command....AWX in latest version is another story

[@minifig404]

Would have been nice to see something about dynamic inventory. Use cases: terraform -> ansible, or maas -> ansible.

[@murtadha96]

Would love a Git video

[@thefirebuilds]

+1 for a git video!

[@PeterNunnOZ]

Hey Christian, thanks for finding this... very interesting. Given this is sponsored by teleport, how would you use this with teleport providing the access? I'm very interested in how that would work.

[@odegraciajr]

Thanks Noho Hank!

[@dancersys]

Have just installed Semaphore and tested a couple of playbooks, it's awesome! It's really friendly and quickly understandable, and convenient for running scheduled playbooks. I first watched about it on your channel, thank you! :))) p.s. you're cute :)))

[@christianlempa]

Thank you so much 😊

[@shawnlewis389]

I would love to see you make a video on Git!

[@bonao99]

Hi Chris, This is very helpful for beginners like me. Thanks. I could not find the sample file under the boilerplates/ansible/installation repo. Have they move to a diff folder?

[@greendsnow]

bro... I was searching for this

[@christianlempa]

Glad it helped :)

[@schrodinger_s_chihuahua]

We can do all the things Ansible semaphore can do and a bit more with Jenkins tbh :) The semaphore UI definitely looks cooler, I'll give it that. :)

[@adibbins]

Hi Chris, I would find it very useful to have a github tutorial, especially I noticed during this video how you created your apt update script in your git video's repository from your vscode, the linking here would be really helpful to me. Thx Andrew

[@TheFern2]

Hi Chris, great video! Quick question, for some of our devices that are on LTE we can't ssh, is there any way around that? maybe using another connection plugin that's not ssh?

[@GrishTech]

Finally, something simple to install and use rather than having to resort to Ansible Tower (or AWX).

[@kavishgour3267]

How is it compared to AWX?

[@legooos]

@@kavishgour3267 second the question

[@LampJustin]

If you have a Kubernetes cluster, AWX installation is super easy, barely an inconvenience! ;) Its featureset is also better and it's also more widely used.

[@GrishTech]

@@LampJustin This is true, yes. But that requires that you know Kubernetes.

[@LedufInfraLeDufiNFrA]

excellent video, as usual thank you chris😊

[@markussachs5199]

A GIT tutorial would be very helpful.

[@H4HDJD]

AWX while maybe a bit more complex has more features and is backed by Red Hat so development is going to keep expanding and improving it

[@vomKuckucksfelsen]

Yes please Git Videos!

[@emboss64]

A good alternative I use is Rundeck 👍

[@aytviewer2421]

Haha.... Real IT Guys used to work in dark mode all the time as there was no other choice on those old IBM, Honeywell, and NCR mainframes and UNIX terminals. Cheers!

[@Equality-and-Liberty]

Finally, I got everything up and running. However, it was not an easy task. Like others who experienced problems, i spend many hours to figure things out. The first problem was with the docker-compose file. I experienced a problem using the database that was installed with the docker-compose files. i already explained how i solved it. The second problem was the SSH connections with Github. First, i make my repository public so that i didn't need to use SSH. That seems to work. Second was the SSH connection to the target server. After hours i finally found out that you have to use the private and public generated keys of the container where you installed Semaphore and not of your Windows, MAC, or whatever machine where your browser is installed, because you are running Semaphore in a container. Once i figure that i was able to connect through SSH to Github and also to the target machine. You can copy the public key to the target machine with the SSH-copy command from the command line of your container after you generate a key. Last but not least, in the video Christian use VS code to move his playbooks to Github. He didn't mention that if you don't use VS-code or you don't know how to do it with VScode you can also do it in GitHub self by uploading it. I hope this helps.

[@mohammedabdullahi5145]

This is where I’m having trouble too. I suspected it has to be the keys generated from inside the container it’s running on not the host key. Are you able to explain this further? Need help understanding it more

[@zacharyparadis6785]

@@mohammedabdullahi5145 ever get any answers with that? having that problem now

[@SintaxBSD]

I would absolutely love a github tutorial, i'm not a developer but i would love to know how to make use of it for my linux vm's and docker containers etc

[@johnpetro6661]

Great video. I have been slowly moving stuff into Semaphore, and the more I use it I like it. There is only one thing that annoys me a bit. If you are trying to watch the run, using the output console, it is not a "live" console. So if you want to see updated output, you need to hit refresh on your browser. A bit annoying, but I've built it into my workflow, so it's no big deal. Honestly, that is really being nit-picky.

[@mvoong]

You behind a reverse proxy? If so, make sure WebSockets is enabled

[@johnpetro6661]

@@mvoong Ohh, good call. I totally missed that when I set it up. Thanks for the help there!

[@lensherm]

Hi Christian, I'm not sure if you did this on purpose, but the playbooks you mentioned are only in the ansiblesemaphore branch, not the main(default) one. Looks like some folks are looking for them, based on the comments below.

[@philamavikane9423]

Christian: Real IT guys should never work without dark mode. Us: This is the way *nod

[@robertroygaard902]

what kind of storagetechnology do you use for your kubernetes environment in your homelab? local, nfs or ceph/rbd???

[@KL-tt]

Hi Chris , do you have any playbook examples on only upgrading security patches for ubuntu servers specifically ?

[@jdnielss]

Nice!!!!

[@christianlempa]

Thank you! Cheers!

[@DarkCHAOS714]

Was just wondering what you matrix looking background is for your mac?

[@ewenchan1239]

Very neat! I'm just starting to learn more about Ansible as I don't really deploy new containers/VMs all that often, but it would be nice to be able to automate and synchronise my user accounts, post install, to SSSD. Thank you.