A free, open-source platform for managing classic infrastructure — built to bring Puppet, Ansible, Bolt, and SSH together in a single, polished web interface.
Pabawi — Classic Infrastructures Command & Control Awesomeness — is a unified web interface and REST API for infrastructure management, inventory discovery, and remote command execution.
It aggregates data from multiple infrastructure tools through a plugin architecture: Puppet, Bolt, PuppetDB, Puppetserver, Hiera, Ansible, and SSH all become first-class integrations, each contributing inventory, facts, or execution capabilities to a single, consistent interface.
The goal is simple: teams managing "classic infrastructure" — bare metal servers, VMs, physical networks — deserve tooling that's as polished, powerful, and pleasant to use as the SaaS platforms built for cloud-native environments. Pabawi is that tool, free and self-hosted.
Every integration is optional and independent. Disable what you don't have. The platform degrades gracefully — if one tool goes down, the rest keep working.
No SaaS, no telemetry, no license server. Your infra data stays in your network. A single Docker container is all you need to deploy.
RBAC, command whitelisting, JWT auth, and full audit trails — real security controls that don't get in the way of getting work done.
Real-time streaming output. Expert mode that exposes exact CLI commands. No magic, no black boxes — you always know what's happening.
Use Puppet? Great. Ansible? Great. Just SSH? Also great. Mix everything? That's the point. No migration required.
Apache 2.0 licensed. Plugin architecture makes adding new integrations straightforward. Contributions welcome.
Pabawi is a project by example42, coordinated by Alessandro Franceschi. The codebase is developed with AI assistance — a deliberate exploration of what's possible when experienced infrastructure engineering judgment guides AI-generated code.
The project started with a clear problem: open-source Puppet users had no equivalent to the Puppet Enterprise console. PuppetDB stores rich data, Bolt can execute anything, Hiera holds your config — but there was no single web UI tying it all together without an enterprise license. Pabawi fills that gap, and keeps expanding to cover the full breadth of classical infrastructure tooling.
Version history reflects deliberate, steady progress: from a Bolt-only prototype in v0.1 to a full RBAC-enabled, multi-integration platform in v0.8, with Proxmox support, scheduling, and cloud integrations on the near horizon.
Alessandro has been working in infrastructure, automation, and configuration management for over two decades. He is the founder of example42, a consultancy and open-source project home specialising in Puppet, DevOps, and infrastructure tooling.
He is a long-time contributor to the Puppet ecosystem, author of numerous open-source Puppet modules and tools, and a speaker at infrastructure and DevOps conferences. Pabawi is his latest project: a modern web interface for the classical infrastructure world he knows deeply.
example42 is an infrastructure consultancy and open-source project home founded by Alessandro Franceschi. The name comes from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — 42 being the answer to life, the universe, and everything, and example reflecting a commitment to clear, educational, real-world demonstrations of infrastructure tooling.
example42 has published dozens of Puppet modules, contributed to the open-source infrastructure community, and run the Tiny Puppet project — a lightweight, opinionated approach to Puppet module development. Pabawi is the latest chapter: a full web platform for the infrastructure teams that example42 has worked with for years.
Pabawi is built on a modern, production-grade stack — chosen for reliability, developer experience, and long-term maintainability:
Pabawi is released under the Apache License 2.0 — a permissive open-source license that allows use, modification, and distribution in both open-source and commercial contexts, with attribution.
Full license text: github.com/example42/pabawi/blob/main/LICENSE
Contributions are welcome. Whether it's a bug report, documentation improvement, new integration plugin, or frontend enhancement — the project is built to be extended.
BasePlugin pattern — well-documented and straightforward to implement