Install ansible-cmdb with Homebrew, Nix, zypper

Project links

• Homepage
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• ansible-cmdb

Project history

The project is maintained in the fboender/ansible-cmdb repository and its manual page identifies the command as a tool to generate host overviews from Ansible facts. Its documentation describes an implementation centered on parsing fact directories and, optionally, Ansible inventory data, then rendering the result through templates.

The 1.x release line was already established by 2015, when the bundled man page was dated 2015-11-11. GitHub releases show continued 1.x maintenance through v1.31, including packaging, variable parsing, and template fixes.

Adoption history

Ansible-CMDB became useful in the gap between ad hoc Ansible fact gathering and heavier infrastructure inventory systems. Its adoption pattern is package-nerdy rather than platform-centric: it appears in Homebrew, Nix, SUSE/openSUSE packaging, and PyPI-oriented workflows because it is a single CLI that can be dropped into cron jobs or documentation pipelines.

The project has a long-lived GitHub footprint with thousands of stars and hundreds of forks, but its release cadence is modest compared with core Ansible tools. That matches its role as a stable reporting add-on rather than an automation engine.

How it is used

The canonical workflow is to run Ansible setup with `--tree` to write fact files, then run `ansible-cmdb out/ > overview.html`. Passing `-i` lets the tool read inventory files or dynamic inventory scripts so host and group variables appear in the report.

Users choose templates with `-t`, add template parameters with `-p`, and can output split HTML for large inventories. It is commonly used when a team wants a browsable snapshot of hosts and facts without deploying AWX, NetBox, ServiceNow, or a custom database.

Why package nerds care

For package maintainers, Ansible-CMDB is a classic Unix-shaped adjunct: one executable, generated static output, no daemon, and broad packaging across Python and OS repositories. Its value is that it turns Ansible's existing fact cache into artifacts that can be archived, published, diffed, or shipped as build output.

It also illustrates how the Ansible ecosystem produced small single-purpose tools around the core CLI before more integrated platforms became common.

Timeline

• 2015: Bundled manual page documents `ansible-cmdb` as a fact-to-overview generator.
• 2017: v1.19 release posts describe static HTML host overview generation and multiple templates.
• 2018: v1.26/v1.26.1 releases focus on packaging and template improvements.
• 2021: v1.31 release fixes PyPI license metadata and template issues.

Related projects

• Ansible provides the fact gathering data consumed by Ansible-CMDB.
• AWX and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform provide heavier web UI, inventory, and job orchestration workflows.
• NetBox, ServiceNow CMDB, and other inventory systems overlap with the infrastructure documentation use case but are not drop-in static report generators.

Sources

• https://ansible-cmdb.readthedocs.io/en/stable/installation/
• https://github.com/fboender/ansible-cmdb
• https://github.com/fboender/ansible-cmdb/blob/master/README.md
• https://github.com/fboender/ansible-cmdb/blob/master/contrib/ansible-cmdb.man.1
• https://github.com/fboender/ansible-cmdb/releases