ARA Records Ansible on Ubuntu 24.04 by cloudimg

ARA Records Ansible (ARA) is a popular open source, self-hosted reporting tool for Ansible. It records the plays, tasks, hosts and results of every Ansible playbook run through a lightweight callback plugin, then makes them easy to browse, search and troubleshoot in a clean web interface backed by a REST API. Point your Ansible at the ARA API server, run your playbooks as usual, and a durable, queryable record of exactly what ran, where, and what changed builds up automatically.

This image delivers ARA fully installed and reverse-proxied behind nginx, so a complete Ansible reporting platform is operational within minutes of launch, with no manual Django, gunicorn, nginx or database configuration. The API/UI application server binds to loopback only and is served behind nginx, and a self-contained SQLite database is used by default so no external database is required for a single-node deployment. Ansible and the ARA callback are installed on the appliance itself, so it can record runs out of the box, and any remote Ansible can be pointed at it just as easily.

Secure by default: unlike a manual install, this image does not expose an unauthenticated read or write path. Both read and write access to the reporting UI and REST API require authentication. No administrator account and no shared password ship in the image; on first boot a fresh application secret key is generated, the database is initialised empty, and a unique administrator credential is generated for that instance and written to a root-only file. You retrieve it over SSH, sign in from your browser, and record your first playbook. This eliminates the default-credential and open-write-endpoint exposure common in manual deployments.

This is a repackaged open source software product with additional charges for cloudimg support services. Our engineers provide 24/7 support for deployment, upgrades, TLS termination, authentication and pointing your Ansible control nodes at the recorder. ARA is distributed under the GNU General Public License v3. All product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Use of them does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by them.