Blogs

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....

We’ve had issues opened about benchmarking and improving the performance of the ara callback plugin as well as the API server for a while now and I only recently took a bit of time to tackle the callback. It paid off because we can already see significant performance benefits in the 1.5.3 release of ara and it builds a foundation for future improvement opportunities. If you’d like to see the raw unformatted data that was used for this post, check out this gist on GitHub....

ARA 1.5.0 as well as 1.5.1 (due to a release issue with PyPi) have been released ! For the full list of changes, see the changelog on GitHub as well as the list of commits since 1.4.3. The changelogs and release notes for every version are now included in the documentation as well. Check out the refreshed getting started guide to try it out. Here you can find some of the highlights for this new release....

1.4 is a significant milestone for the project and adds a number of new features, bugfixes and improvements. The first release candidate, 1.4.0rc1, is available for testing from PyPi with pip install --pre ara[server]. Here you can find some of the highlights for this upcoming release. For the full list of changes, see the changelog or the list of commits since 1.3.2. The ara_api Ansible role now supports EL8 The ara_api Ansible role can be used to deploy and configure a production-ready ARA API server and, in fact, this is the role used to deploy the live demo on api....

0.16.7 is a maintenance release for ARA 0.x. Changes since 0.16.6: Fix typo in ara.setup.env for ANSIBLE_ACTION_PLUGINS (pull request) Pin pyfakefs to <4 in order to avoid breaking python2 usage (issue) Pin junit-xml to <=1.8 in order to avoid deprecation warnings in unit tests ARA 0.x end of life The code base for ARA 0.x has not been actively maintained and developed since 2018 and will officially reach end of life June 4th, 2019, one year after the release of ARA 1....

ARA has come a long way since I created it as a side project back in 2016. The end of 2019 is here and I thought this was a good opportunity to look back at the progress of the project over the past year. The journey to finally release 1.0 ARA 0.x has been successful at recording Ansible playbook runs and providing reporting capabitilies. However, it lacked – amongst other things – an API to make it easier to integrate with other systems....

ARA 1.3.0 has been released ! You can refer to GitHub repository for the changelog as well as the full list of changes since 1.2. Here are some of the highlights in this new version: Required python version Before ARA 1.3, it was required to run the API server under at least python 3.6 and above. We’ve removed the requirement on python 3.6 by replacing a few instances of python f-strings by a compatible string format....

We are happy to announce that ARA has successfully been included in Fedora ! The latest version (1.2.0) is available for Fedora 30, Fedora 31 as well as Rawhide (Fedora 32). You can find the source for the packaging files on src.fedoraproject.org and the builds on koji.fedoraproject.org. Contributions to improve the packaging are welcome ! How to get started If you are using Ansible from Fedora packages, you can start recording playbooks with ARA easily:...

ARA 0.16.6 is a maintenance release for users that are not yet using ARA 1.x. Changes since 0.16.5: Fixed web application crash due to encoding/decoding of binary non-ascii content in task results The sqlite middleware was adapted to support running under gunicorn as well as mod_wsgi python -m ara.setup.env now returns commands that use bash expansion to take into account existing environment variables Eventual end of life for ARA 0....

ARA 1.2.0 has been released ! You can refer to GitHub repository for the changelog as well as the full list of changes. Here are some of the highlights in this new version: A simple built-in interface Back by popular demand, ARA 1.2.0 re-introduces a built-in web interface included by default with the API server. This new lightweight and simple interface is designed to work without any additional dependencies. It is still very much a work in progress but we would love to hear about what you think about it !...