What is playbook-runner?

Playbook Runner is a self hosted web app for running Ansible playbooks against your servers, built as a lighter alternative to heavier tools like AWX or Ansible Tower. If you have ever logged into a server by SSH, run ansible-playbook by hand, and watched the output scroll by in a terminal, this tool gives you a browser tab and a database for all of that instead: playbooks, one off commands, SSH credentials, the list of devices you manage, groups of devices, scheduled runs, and a log of every run that happened. Installing it on a server is meant to be quick. You create an empty folder, run a single install script with curl, answer a few prompts for an admin username and password, and the script generates the needed secrets, writes a configuration file, pulls prebuilt container images, and starts everything up. Once running, you get a dashboard showing your devices, credentials, playbooks, and recent job runs at a glance. From the web interface you can store SSH credentials for your servers, either by importing an existing key or generating a new one right in the browser, along with a ready made setup script you can run on a new server to create a user and grant it access. You can write and save Ansible playbooks directly in the browser instead of editing files by hand, run them against a chosen group of devices, and watch the output stream in live as each task completes. There is also a page for quick one off commands that do not need a full playbook, and a scheduler for running jobs automatically on a cron style schedule. The app supports multiple user accounts and can be configured to use a company single sign on system alongside normal email and password logins. Under the hood, the project is a small collection of three services: a web frontend built with Astro and React, a backend built with Hono and a Postgres database, and a separate Python service using FastAPI that actually runs the Ansible commands and streams their output back over the network. The Python side has no database of its own, it only knows how to run what the backend tells it to run.