Ansible can be used in many ways: most people likely execute their playbooks on their local machines. Then there is Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) (formerly Ansible Tower) and its small brother AWX. Both are the standard in larger organizations to allow for a more controlled way of running Ansible playbooks and offer RBAC capabilities. These two are also really “heavy” and require a lot of resources to run. Since some time both also require a Kubernetes backend.

These facts are not attractive for homelabs or other small-scale use cases. Luckily, Semaphore exists, which is a project aiming to provide a lightweight alternative to AAP. Maybe there are also even more alternatives, yet I was not able to find any others when researching the topic until today.

This article describes one approach to setting up a GitLab CI/CD pipeline for testing and deploying Ansible content.