Running Your First Playbook from Ansible AWX — My DevOps Journey By Sireesha

#automation #beginners #devops #tutorial

In my previous blogs, I covered how to deploy AWX on Kubernetes using Helm and how to sync GitLab projects into AWX. Now that AWX is up and running, the next thing I wanted to do was actually run a playbook from the AWX UI — and that involves setting up a few things first.
In this blog I'll walk through everything you need to configure inside AWX before you can launch your first job:

Dashboard overview
Adding an Organisation
Adding Users
Adding Inventory and Hosts
Adding Credentials
Adding a Project
Creating a Job Template and launching it

Let's go step by step.

The AWX Dashboard
When you first log in with your admin credentials, you land on the AWX dashboard. It gives you a nice overview of everything happening on your server at a glance:

Number of hosts that have successfully run playbooks
Number of hosts that failed
Total number of inventories
Number of projects and their sync status
A graph showing playbook runs over time

On the left side you'll see four main sections — Resources, Access, Administration and Settings. Everything we need is in here.

Step 1 — Add an Organisation
The first thing I set up was an organisation. In AWX, almost everything sits under an organisation — users, credentials, projects, inventories.

On the left pane go to Access → Organisations
Click Add
Enter a Name and Description
Click Save

Simple enough — but don't skip this, everything else depends on it.

Step 2 — Add a User
Next I created a user under the organisation. AWX has three user types and it's worth understanding the difference before you set one up:
Normal User — can create, use and update templates. Good for engineers who need to run playbooks but shouldn't have full admin access.
System Auditor — can view inventory, templates and job status but cannot create or modify anything. Great for someone who just needs visibility.
System Administrator — has full privileges, same as the default admin account. Use this carefully.
To add a user:

Left pane → Access → Users
Click Add
Enter First Name, Last Name, Email, Username and Password
Select the Organisation you just created
Choose the User Type based on the access you want to give
Click Save

Step 3 — Add an Inventory
An inventory in AWX is basically your list of hosts — the machines you want to run playbooks against. You can organise them into groups like development, testing, and production.
To add an inventory:

Left pane → Resources → Inventories
Click Add → Add Inventory
Enter a Name and select your Organisation
Click Save

Adding Hosts to the Inventory
Once the inventory is saved, add your hosts to it:

Open the inventory you just created
Click the Hosts tab
Click Add Host
Enter the Hostname — this can be an IP address or a URL. For example, my host IP was 192.168.237.145
Add a Description if you want
Click Save

You can add as many hosts as you need. I added two hosts to my inventory. You can also temporarily remove a host from the inventory using the on/off toggle on the right side of each host — handy when you want to skip a machine without deleting it.

Step 4 — Add Credentials
AWX stores credentials separately from everything else — which is actually a really clean way to manage it. You create a credential once and reuse it across multiple templates.

Left pane → Resources → Credentials
Click Add
Enter a Name and Description
Select your Organisation
Select Credential Type → choose Machine (this is similar to SSH login)
Enter the Username and Password of the remote machine
If your playbook needs to run as root, fill in the Privilege Escalation Username and Password as well
Click Save

If You're Pulling Playbooks from a Git Repo
If your playbooks are coming from GitHub or GitLab, you'll need a second credential for source control:

Follow the same steps above but select GitHub Personal Access Token as the credential type
Paste your token and save

To get a GitHub personal access token:

Log into GitHub → Settings → Developer Settings → Personal Access Tokens → Generate new token
Copy it and paste it into AWX — you won't see it again after leaving that page!

Step 5 — Add a Project
A project in AWX is where you point AWX to your playbooks — either from a Git repo or a directory on the AWX server itself.

Left pane → Resources → Projects
Click Add
Enter a Name and Description
Select your Organisation
Select SCM Type:
Choose Git if your playbooks are in GitHub or GitLab
Choose Manual if the playbooks are already sitting on the AWX server in a local directory

Enter the SCM URL — this is your GitHub/GitLab repo URL
Under SCM Update Options select what makes sense for your setup — I ticked Update Revision on Launch so AWX always pulls the latest version
Click Save

Once saved, hit the Sync button. Wait for the status to turn green — that means AWX has successfully pulled your playbooks from the repo.

Step 6 — Create a Job Template and Launch It
This is the exciting part — this is where you actually wire everything together and run your playbook.

Left pane → Resources → Templates
Click Add → Add Job Template
Enter Name, Job type check or run , inventory, project, crendetails
Click Save
Click Launch 🚀

AWX will start running the job and you can watch the output in real time right from the UI. Every task, every host, every result — all visible on screen. No more tailing log files!

What the Output Looks Like
Once the job runs, AWX shows you a full breakdown:

Which tasks ran on which hosts
Green for ok, yellow for changed, red for failed
Total summary at the end showing how many tasks succeeded or failed per host

If something fails, you can click into the task and see the exact error — no guessing needed.

What I Noticed Along the Way
The credential separation is really useful. Because credentials are stored separately, I can update a password in one place and every template using that credential picks it up automatically. No hunting through playbooks.
The on/off host toggle is underrated. Being able to disable a host in the inventory without deleting it saved me a few times when I wanted to test on just one machine.
Always sync your project before creating a template. If you create a template before syncing the project, the playbook dropdown will be empty. Sync first, then create the template — saves confusion.
Check mode is your friend Before running anything on production hosts, I always create the template with Job Type: Check first. It does a dry run and shows what would change without actually changing anything.

What's Next
Now that I can run playbooks from AWX, the next things I want to cover are: