I’ve been working on Alphie, a self-hosted automation controller for Ansible and Terraform. It’s meant to be a more focused alternative to things like AWX/AAP and Semaphore — simpler than AWX/AAP, but with more options than Semaphore.
Why I built it:
- I wanted a single place to run Ansible playbooks and Terraform plans without standing up multiple tools.
- AWX updates seem to be slowing down, and AAP’s commercial pricing ends up much more expensive for the kind of automation volume most people care about.
What Alphie does today:
- Runbooks (Ansible jobs) with logs, limits, and per-run variables.
- Pipelines (multiple jobs in sequence) with per-step runners and approvals.
- Targets/hosts and access packages (credentials) managed in the UI.
- Schedules to run jobs/pipelines at specific times.
- Runner containers (Podman) that actually execute the Ansible runs.
- Terraform integration so you can trigger plans/applies from the same UI.
I am also pleased to report that Alphie is already running successfully in production at a large, non-profit hospital system. This environment includes dozens of hospitals and clinics across multiple U.S. states and manages its infrastructure as code across a hybrid cloud environment, including on-premises and multiple cloud tenants.
Tech stack:
- Backend: Python (FastAPI), PostgreSQL.
- Runners: Podman containers on Linux, using different runtime “realms” for different Ansible versions.
- Self-hosted only; no cloud dependency and no data leaves your environment.
Licensing:
- There’s a free trial build with some limits (number of runbooks/pipelines, etc.) so you can try it out.
- There will soon be a “Pro” version with licenses for people who want to use it more broadly, but I’m mainly looking for feedback right now.
I’d love feedback from this crowd on:
- The overall concept: does this fill a real gap for you vs AWX/AAP/Semaphore/etc?
- The install experience (docs are at https://alphieui.com/docs).
- Anything obviously missing or confusing in the UI / mental model (runbooks, pipelines, runners, realms, etc).
Happy to answer technical questions about the architecture, packaging, or anything else.
Why I built it: - I wanted a single place to run Ansible playbooks and Terraform plans without standing up multiple tools. - AWX updates seem to be slowing down, and AAP’s commercial pricing ends up much more expensive for the kind of automation volume most people care about.
What Alphie does today: - Runbooks (Ansible jobs) with logs, limits, and per-run variables. - Pipelines (multiple jobs in sequence) with per-step runners and approvals. - Targets/hosts and access packages (credentials) managed in the UI. - Schedules to run jobs/pipelines at specific times. - Runner containers (Podman) that actually execute the Ansible runs. - Terraform integration so you can trigger plans/applies from the same UI.
I am also pleased to report that Alphie is already running successfully in production at a large, non-profit hospital system. This environment includes dozens of hospitals and clinics across multiple U.S. states and manages its infrastructure as code across a hybrid cloud environment, including on-premises and multiple cloud tenants.
Tech stack: - Backend: Python (FastAPI), PostgreSQL. - Runners: Podman containers on Linux, using different runtime “realms” for different Ansible versions. - Self-hosted only; no cloud dependency and no data leaves your environment.
Licensing: - There’s a free trial build with some limits (number of runbooks/pipelines, etc.) so you can try it out. - There will soon be a “Pro” version with licenses for people who want to use it more broadly, but I’m mainly looking for feedback right now.
I’d love feedback from this crowd on: - The overall concept: does this fill a real gap for you vs AWX/AAP/Semaphore/etc? - The install experience (docs are at https://alphieui.com/docs). - Anything obviously missing or confusing in the UI / mental model (runbooks, pipelines, runners, realms, etc).
Happy to answer technical questions about the architecture, packaging, or anything else.