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Author: alvagante

_posts/2026-03-15-silent-is-not-idle.md

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+---
+layout: blog
+title: Announcing Pabawi, a web frontend for classic infrastructures
+---
+
+# Pabawi is Growing Fast: from v0.4 to v0.8 in Two Months
+
+Two months ago I wrote about Pabawi, a web frontend for classic infrastructures. At the time, v0.4.0 had just shipped with Bolt, PuppetDB, PuppetServer and Hiera integrations. It was a working prototype — useful, but rough around the edges.
+
+Today, four releases later, Pabawi is a different animal. This post is a catch-up: what changed, where we're going, and why I think this project matters more than ever.
+
+## What happened in two months
+
+Development moved fast. Here's what each release brought:
+
+**v0.5.0** — Deeper Puppet visibility  
+Report filtering, Puppet run history visualization with timeline view, and an enhanced expert mode with frontend logging. If you use PuppetDB seriously, this version made Pabawi genuinely useful for day-to-day operations.
+
+**v0.6.0** — Foundations  
+Mostly internal: code consolidation, architecture cleanup, bug fixing. Not glamorous, but necessary. A project that grows this fast needs these stabilization moments.
+
+**v0.7.0** — Ansible joins the party  
+This was a big one. Ansible integration landed, meaning Pabawi is no longer a "Puppet tool" — it's a multi-tool. If you run a mixed environment (and most people do), you can now see and act on Ansible-managed nodes from the same interface. Also: class-aware Hiera lookups, which makes the Hiera Data Browser significantly more useful.
+
+**v0.8.0** — RBAC and SSH  
+Role-based access control. Multiple users, controlled access, audit trail. This is what takes Pabawi from "personal tool on localhost" to something you can actually deploy for a team. SSH integration also landed, adding direct SSH-based node management and expanding the inventory sources available.
+
+
+## The bigger picture
+
+When I started Pabawi, the goal was simple: I wanted a modern OSS web UI for Puppet and Bolt. The classic infrastructure space — physical servers, VMs, decades of accumulated systems — is enormous, but it's been left behind by tooling.
+
+Everyone builds for Kubernetes. Everyone builds for cloud-native. But the people managing 200 bare-metal servers running CentOS 7 with Puppet? They get a CLI and a prayer.
+
+Pabawi is trying to fix that. Not by replacing Puppet or Ansible or Bolt — those tools are excellent at what they do. But by giving you a single, modern web interface to work with all of them together.
+
+The vision: one pane of glass for classic infrastructure.
+
+
+## What's coming
+
+**Proxmox integration** is in active development. If you manage VMs on Proxmox — and a lot of people do — this will let you see and interact with your virtualization layer alongside your configuration management data.
+
+After that, the roadmap extends further:
+
+- **Icinga / CheckMK** — bring monitoring context into the same interface
+- **Terraform** — infrastructure provisioning alongside configuration management  
+- **EC2 / Azure** — for hybrid environments that span on-prem and cloud
+- **Choria, scheduled executions, custom dashboards**
+
+The pattern is consistent: wherever you have servers you care about, Pabawi should be able to see them and help you act on them.
+
+
+## Try it
+
+Getting started is straightforward. Clone the repo and run the setup script:
+
+```bash
+git clone https://github.com/example42/pabawi
+cd pabawi
+./scripts/setup.sh
+```
+
+Or use Docker:
+
+```bash
+docker run -d \
+  --name pabawi \
+  -p 127.0.0.1:3000:3000 \
+  -v "$(pwd)/pabawi:/pabawi" \
+  --env-file ".env" \
+  example42/pabawi:latest
+```
+
+Full docs at [github.com/example42/pabawi](https://github.com/example42/pabawi).
+
+
+## Give it a try — and tell me what you think
+
+If Pabawi looks useful for your infrastructure, the best thing you can do right now is try it and tell me what's missing.
+
+Clone it, run `./scripts/setup.sh`, and connect it to your existing Puppet, Bolt or Ansible setup. It should take less than 30 minutes to have something running. If it doesn't, that's already useful feedback.
+
+👉 [github.com/example42/pabawi](https://github.com/example42/pabawi)
+
+If you find it useful, a GitHub star goes a long way for an open source project. If you find something broken or missing, open an issue — the roadmap is driven by real users.
+
+**Want help setting it up?** I'm still offering a free shared-screen setup session — 30 minutes, no strings attached. We get it running in your environment, connected to your tools. Reach out on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alessandrofranceschi/) to schedule a call.
+
+
+On behalf of Alessandro Franceschi