Features
What Yardmaster does today.
| Capability | What you get |
|---|---|
| Runs | Submit over HTTP, real ansible-playbook underneath, human log plus a structured event stream, per-task drill-down with stdout, stderr, rc, and diff. |
| Live view | Server-Sent Events paint the host matrix and log as the run executes. |
| Splits | Shard an inventory across parallel slices, merged back into one matrix. Hosts packed by measured duration from past runs. |
| Shard retry | Retry a finished split and only its failed shards run again, lineage recorded. |
| Pipelines | Ordered steps or a dependency graph with parallel branches. Failures skip exactly their dependents, per-step retry budgets, set_stats outputs flow to dependent steps as extra vars. |
| Workers | Point yardmaster worker at the same database and it competes for queued runs. Leases, heartbeats, and a janitor make dead workers safe. |
| Scheduling | Cron schedules fire runs, splits, or pipelines with full history per fire. |
| Fleet memory | Failure rankings, flaky-host detection, outcome sparklines, per-host history, task duration trends, all from persisted structured events. |
| Recovery | Cancellation across processes recorded as canceled, orphaned runs interrupted by lease expiry, terminal saves retried. |
| Storage | SQLite by default. The same flag takes a PostgreSQL DSN for multi-instance. |
| Projects | Playbooks sourced from git with clone-or-fetch sync. Every run records the exact commit it executed. |
| Templates | Saved launch presets bundling project, playbook, credentials, shards, and extra vars. One click or one POST launches. |
| Auth | User accounts with admin, operator, and viewer roles enforced per route. Bearer tokens hashed at rest. The API locks down the moment the first token exists. |
| Approvals | Mark a run to require sign-off, or require it automatically by policy on tool, command, or target. A held run never executes until an admin approves or rejects it, and the request and decision land in the tamper-evident audit trail. |
| Observability | A Prometheus metrics endpoint, webhook notifications when runs finish, and an audit trail of every mutation. |
| Tamper-evident audit | Every mutation is linked into a SHA-256 hash chain. GET /audit/verify flags the first altered or deleted entry, and a signed export verified with yardmaster audit verify proves the whole chain offline. |
| Inventories | Stored inventories referenced by id, materialized on whichever executor runs the play. |
| Dynamic sources | Inventory plugins and scripts refreshed into stored inventories, with cloud auth from an env credential. |
| Sourced inventories | An inventory's content can come from a command, Vault, or Google Secret Manager, resolved at launch, so the host list need not live in Yardmaster. |
| Credentials | SSH keys, vault passwords, env bundles for cloud SDKs, API tokens and JWTs, become passwords, and registry logins, all encrypted at rest. |
| Secret masking | Credential values are redacted from run logs, live streams, and events, so a tool that echoes a secret shows *** instead of the value. |
| High availability | Two servers on one database share the schedule without double-firing. Tokens can carry a lifetime. |
| Git triggers | A webhook URL launches a template on push. The project syncs fresh, so it deploys the commit just pushed. |
| Surveys | Templates declare typed launch prompts, validated and injected as extra vars. |
| Worker queues | Target a run at a named queue. A worker serving that queue runs it and default workers leave it alone. |
| Dependency sync | A project's requirements.yml roles and collections install on each sync, so playbooks that need them just run. |
| Execution environments | A project can pin a container image. Its runs execute inside it with their own ansible and system dependencies. |
| Teams and grants | Group users into teams and grant use or manage on a specific project, template, inventory, or credential. Grants layer on the global role and default open. |
| Retention | A sweeper drops old run events and deletes terminal runs past a configurable age, keeping the summaries the cross-run views need. |
| An SMTP notification on every finished run or on failures only, alongside the finish webhooks. | |
| Slack | A formatted message posts to a Slack incoming webhook when a run finishes, with the run label, status, and elapsed time. |
| Migration | yardmaster import awx and import semaphore read an export and create the equivalent projects, inventories, templates, surveys, schedules, and credential shells, with a dry-run report first. |