Administration Guide
Welcome to the Semaphore UI Administration Guide. This guide provides comprehensive information for installing, configuring, and maintaining your Semaphore instance.
What is Semaphore UI?
Semaphore UI is a modern, open-source web interface for running automation tasks. It is designed to be a lightweight, fast, and easy-to-use alternative to more complex automation platforms.
It allows you to securely manage and execute tasks for:
- Ansible playbooks
- Terraform/OpenTofu infrastructure-as-code
- PowerShell and Shell scripts
- Python scripts
Core Features & Philosophy
Understanding Semaphore's design principles can help you get the most out of it:
- Lightweight and Performant: Semaphore is written in Go and distributed as a single binary file. It has minimal resource requirements (CPU/RAM) and does not require external dependencies like Kubernetes, Docker, or a JVM. This makes it fast, efficient, and easy to deploy.
- Simple to Install and Maintain: You can get Semaphore running in minutes. Installation can be as simple as downloading the binary and running it. The simple architecture makes upgrades and maintenance straightforward.
- Flexible Deployment: Run it as a binary, as a systemd service, or in a Docker container. It's suitable for everything from a personal homelab to enterprise environments.
- Self-Hosted and Secure: Semaphore is a self-hosted solution. All your data, credentials, and logs remain on your own infrastructure, giving you full control. Credentials are always encrypted in the database.
- Powerful Integrations: While simple, Semaphore supports powerful features like LDAP/OpenID authentication, detailed role-based access control (RBAC) per project, remote runners for scaling out task execution, and a full REST API for programmatic access.
This guide will walk you through setting up and managing these features for your specific needs.