Simplicity is a feature

I like to say that simplicity is a feature of ara. The project was consciously designed to be simple by adhering to principles from the UNIX philosophy (do one thing and do it well) and the Zen of Python (simple is better than complex): It records Ansible and makes it easier to understand and troubleshoot. It is expected to be simple to install and use. It is intended to have few moving parts and a limited number of dependencies....

April 26, 2024 · 2 min · David Moreau Simard

Announcing the release of ARA 1.7.0

stable diffusion, img2img with controlnet: low poly, paper craft origami parrot, illustration, studio lighting ARA 1.7.0 has been released and you can try it out with the getting started guide or by checking out the live demo at https://demo.recordsansible.org. TL;DR: # Install ansible and ara in a virtualenv python3 -m venv ~/.ara/venv source ~/.ara/venv/bin/activate pip install ansible ara[server] # Run a playbook with ara enabled export ANSIBLE_CALLBACK_PLUGINS=$(python3 -m ara....

September 12, 2023 · 4 min · David Moreau Simard

Benchmarking ara with different databases and python 3.11 for fun and science

We’ve last benchmarked ara itself as well as different versions of python and ansible but it’s been a while ! Since then: ansible-core 2.11, 2.12, 2.13 and 2.14 have released (time flies!) python 3.10 as well as 3.11 have come out ara has had a few releases with the latest being 1.6.1 Python 3.11 is reported to be up to 10-60% faster than Python 3.10 and it felt like a good opportunity for some new benchmarking metrics including database backends....

February 26, 2023 · 6 min · David Moreau Simard

Announcing the release of ARA 1.6.0

ARA 1.6.0 has been released and you can try it out with the getting started guide or by checking out the live demo at https://demo.recordsansible.org. This blog post will highlight some of the changes since 1.5.8 but for the full list, see: the changelog on GitHub the list of commits since 1.5.8 You can also catch up on the changelog and release notes for every version until now in the documentation....

December 5, 2022 · 7 min · David Moreau Simard

What might ara 2.0 look like ?

I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while and I’m interested in what you think. Head to this GitHub issue for discussing this post. Broadly speaking, in semantic versioning, you bump a major version to signal users that they should expect backwards incompatible changes. About the jump from 0.x to 1.x ara has loosely adhered to semantic versioning and so far has only ever needed to do this once:...

May 19, 2022 · 5 min · David Moreau Simard

Announcing the release of ARA 1.5.8

ARA 1.5.8 has been released and you can try it out with the getting started guide or by checking out the live demo at https://demo.recordsansible.org. For the full list of changes, see the changelog on GitHub as well as the list of commits since 1.5.7. You can also catch up on the changelog and release notes for every version until now in the documentation. 1.5.8 features fixes as well as general maintenance work to address python and dependency deprecations while adding a few features....

March 31, 2022 · 2 min · David Moreau Simard

Recording Ansible playbooks from AWX with ara

I must preface this blog post with a disclaimer. I’ve debated whether this should go in documentation and settled on a blog post instead because there are some opinions involved and it’s not something the project can (capital S) Support. I wouldn’t say no if someone wanted to contribute documentation or commit to support it but this has so far not materialized since the project exists. In other words: consider this is a humble holiday season gift to you in hope that it is useful but with no guarantee....

December 23, 2021 · 6 min · David Moreau Simard

Announcing the release of ARA 1.5.7

ARA 1.5.7 has been released and you can try it out with the getting started guide or by checking out the live demo at https://demo.recordsansible.org. For the full list of changes, see the changelog on GitHub as well as the list of commits since 1.5.6. You can also catch up on the changelog and release notes for every version until now in the documentation. 1.5.7 features a brand new “hosts” page to browse and search playbook reports by host as well as fixes and improvements....

August 2, 2021 · 4 min · David Moreau Simard

Announcing the release of ARA 1.5.6

ARA 1.5.6 has been released and you can try it out with the getting started guide or by checking out the live demo at https://demo.recordsansible.org. For the full list of changes, see the changelog on GitHub as well as the list of commits since 1.5.5. It’s been a while since the last release highlight for 1.5.0 but you can catch up on changelogs and release notes for every version until now in the documentation....

April 15, 2021 · 3 min · David Moreau Simard

Benchmarking Ansible and python versions for fun and science

In the last blog post, we benchmarked the overhead of recording Ansible playbooks with ara. There’s still room for improvement but we measured that it was on the right track and getting better. The data is useful so we can tell whether we’re improving things or making them worse ! ara 1.5.5 adds support for searching playbooks by Ansible versions and I was curious what kind of data we would get if we ran our benchmark with different versions of Ansible....

January 30, 2021 · 5 min · David Moreau Simard