Hold On a Minute

If you have followed the steps above verbatim, you have probably managed to save the new project but noticed at the bottom of the screen (Figure 3) a red exclamation mark to the left of the project name. When you create a project, I suspect AWX automatically tests the Software Configuration Management (SCM) repository access, with or without credentials, and/or potentially runs it.

Figure 3: AWX isnot happy with the project config and throws up an error.

Because of the pointy-clicky nature of the powerful AWX, it is probably easier to let you work through the intricacies of your own projects. Showing a failure will therefore help you out the most. In Figure 4, you can see the AWX output when a job fails by clicking Jobs on the left-hand navigation pane.

Figure 4: The job spawned from the project did not work properly.

By adjusting the SCM URL initially put into the project, you can now save your project without failure. Simply adjusting the playbook URL to https://github.com/chrisbinnie/DevSecOps removes the warning exclamation mark. As AWX tries to get access to the repo and process the job, you will see a pulsing green circle, which means it is working away in the background; I suspect it is pulling the latest code and running the job to see if it completes.

Job’s A Good ’Un

Back on the main Jobs page again and clicking on the welcome “green” job (denoting success), you can see (Figure 5) that the simple playbook completed correctly this time. Look at the YAML (STDOUT) output, too, in the right-hand pane. You can drill down easily into more detail.

Figure 5: This time, the job completed.

You can re-run the job by clicking the rocket icon, or you can delete it by clicking on the trash can.

The other aspect to familiarize yourself with is the templates configuration, which helps run jobs. Again, the template config is in the navigation pane and easy to find. I will leave you to explore that further.

Call Out the Big Guns

Of course, you will want to know (immediately sometimes) about the successes and failures of your many playbooks. Figure 6 shows some of the options available under Notifications on the left-hand side. All the usual suspects are present and accounted for, along with good old email.

Figure 6: Where to configure your email client or chat rooms in the AWX console.