It's now a UI for Ansible, Terraform and more! // Semaphore

In this video, I take another look at Ansible Semaphore, now rebranded as Semaphore UI. This project has evolved from a simple web UI for Ansible into a modern DevOps automation tool, supporting technologies like Ansible, Terraform, OpenTofu, and Bash. I’ll walk you through the exciting new features and updates in Semaphore UI, share my experiences testing it in my HomeLab, and discuss some aspects that still need improvement. Join me as we explore everything new in Semaphore UI and what could be better in this latest version.

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Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction
01:57 What is new?
06:20 Terraform example
15:18 Is it all perfect?
18:02 Webhooks
22:49 Final thoughts

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[dushkodavchev]

I really like where the Semaphore UI concept is going. Thank you for the video!

[oldcmputer]

Thank you so much for doing a video on this and referencing the open source model. I just deployed this at work & plan to contribute & support them. This Ansible webUI is such a game changer!!! Great video & would love to see some cool Ansible or OpenTofu refresh videos. ✌🏻from Chicago.

[sebastiaanhommes]

Hi Christian, thnx for this video, awesome as usual! But I do am curious what your opinion is on Semaphore vs Kestra?

[zancres]

Loving the Semaphore UI series. Can you make a video example about provisioning and setup of an AWS or other web service VM using SemaphoreUI?

[jonny.rubber]

I see you are putting it all together.

[DillPL]

If you already have self-hosted GitLab instance, you might use it as remote HTTP backed for Terraform :p

This reduces the extra remote dependency on Hashicorp cloud.

[ScooterBean]

For the state issue id just use seaweedfs or minio as a backend. Both just act in place of S3. Also worth noting something like atlantis layered in here would be nice as well. Although im not a huge fan of atlantis too much config per repo.

[shiftsystems]

For secrets and semaphore I'm using environment variables which support secrets

[andreashe]

Did not find any video yet how to address groups in inventory . What if a task shall only apply to specific servers e.g. in inventory group?

[tapasmallick]

Hello,

We have deployed semaphore as a docker container and it works as usual. But when we put it behind a nginx reverse proxy with location based routing (e.g. /semaphore), it seize to work. I requested for help in semaphore community discussion forum but didn't get any assistance yet. It will be really a great help to address the issue as I can't afford to have nginx web_root dedicated for semaphore as there are some other web based standalone or docker based containers are running on the same host behind same reverse proxy (e.g. grafana & portainer).

[XortiX]

Hi Christian!
Kannst Du uns vielleicht zeigen, wie man Authentik in Semaphore nutzen kann?

[laurentiusjudhianto]

Nice video, this was something I wanted to see for a long time. Yet I wonder what is the benefit of using Semphore if we already have Kestra / Rundeck. I do think I still prefer Rundeck (or Kestra) over this, because Rundeck offer interface for filling the input (custom form) with predefined output.

[shazcool]

auto-approve option is there as a check-box while running the terraform but it is still asking for the approval/confirmation

[amandeepsingh]

Can you please make vedio on Semaphore webhook for bitbucket because bitbucket is not supporting custom headers option, Thanks

[LtFrankDrebin]

While i am still wondering where the untrusted certificate comes from (at 15:00 when you deploy port 80 and address port 443).

[gd_carbn]

I'm curious how you setup passwordless authentication on authentik.

[michaelkoch]

Looks nice and useful to run some stuff. But why not use a Gitlab integration with gitlab-runner and the pipelines, should be integrated much better. Gitlab can also handle Terraform states for you.

[zhuco]

I have tried to pass command line arguments to bash or python script. I could not get it to work. the command arguments (in bash $@), it always blank. Have you ever tried?

[s.i.m.c.a]

so it is really a problem of semaphore ui - it not provides any backend for storing the states or job artifacts

[iamunknownperiod]

Does it support preprocessing Terraform? For example, something that HCL doesn't support required me to generate Terraform code first. Will it be able to handle that? I think it can be done with bash or Ansible and just nest Terraform inside but I assume there are niceties in having the built-in Terraform handle it.

Also, side note. I don't get Kubernetes manifests inside Terraform. It seems unnecessary.