To Do - List of major things on the Roadmap

cigamit

This is just a running list of major projects that we are looking to do for Ascender project. Some of these have to be done by my team (like Publishing), others can be done by the Community.

Also let us know if there is something you think should be added to the list.

Ascender Collection

~~Waiting until we are sure its ready, will then publish to Galaxy~~ COMPLETE

Execution Environment Builder

Currently in its own branch
I just need to change it to use a Project instead of directly adding a builder manifest, so that you can manage it via git and include other files.
Allow utilizing EEs other than the control plane?
Add ansible-builder tools to ascender-ee

Themes

~~We currently have a dark / light mode, but are looking to add multiple different themes instead~~ COMPLETE
~~Add Classic AWX look~~ COMPLETE

Operator

Continue to rebrand it (nearly done)
Upgrade to Postgres 17 (bypass 16 as 17 has a lot of performance enhancements)

Helm Chart

~~Forked from upstream.~~
~~Currently lives at cigamit/ascender-operator-helm~~
~~Will get it moved to CIQ repo once I am sure its ready~~
COMPLETE, using one that lives in the Operator instead of a separate repo

Installer

Finish moving the K8s installer stuff to its own repo
Clean out all non-open source stuff
Add ansible and yaml linters workflows
Add generic manifest generator

Ascender Enhancements

Finish rebranding to remove all occurrences of AWX (function names, variables, config options, etc...). Some of it will need to be coordinated with Operator changes.
Add additional password managers to Ascender, like 1Password and Bitwarden
More Dynamic Inventory plugins (like Nutanix). Some are kinda difficult as we don't have hardware to test with.
Other tools, like a template / jinja2 tester, etc...

blaipr

Where the items on that list stand from my side, ticked when the work has landed and left plain when it has not.

Ascender Collection

✅ awx.awx became ctrliq.ascender, released on Galaxy (#2).

Ascenderkit

✅ awxkit became ascenderkit, released on PyPI as ascender-kit (#660).

Themes

✅ Shipped a theme selector with four themes, chosen per user, in 25.5.0 (#588).
✅ The AWX look shipped as Classic, close but not identical because of core PF6 differences (#589).
✅ Added a theme uploader: an administrator adds a CSS theme from Settings (#898).

Helm chart

✅ The awx-operator chart became ascender-operator (#35).

Python

✅ Moved the container images to Python 3.14 (#811).
✅ uv replaced pip-tools for the requirements lockfiles (#899).
✅ uv replaced pip-tools for the docs lockfile too (#908).
✅ Added a Ruff config beside flake8, and fixed everything it found (#909).
✅ Ruff then replaced black and flake8 outright (#910).
✅ Package metadata moved from setup.cfg to pyproject.toml (#900).
☐ Move pytest.ini into pyproject.toml (#960).
☐ Move .coveragerc into pyproject.toml (#967).

Django

✅ Moved to Django 6.1.1 (#814).
✅ Moved to django-oauth-toolkit 3.4.1 (#822).

Database

✅ Moved the test suite onto PostgreSQL (#813).
✅ Removed SQLite from the test suite (#817).
☐ Reuse a web process's database connection, which nothing does today (#946).
☐ Flatten UnifiedJob only if a feature needs it, which nothing does (#961).
☐ Give job events a retention story, the biggest table in the database (#949).

A smaller dependency footprint

☐ Remove the unused openshift, python-daemon, lockfile and pexpect (#920).
✅ IRC moved onto socket and ssl, dropping 15 packages and fixing 3.14 (#923).
✅ PagerDuty moved onto one requests POST, which is all pygerduty did (#924).
☐ Send Twilio messages with one POST, which is all the SDK does (#925).
☐ DER-encode the receptor hostname with cryptography, dropping asn1 (#921).
☐ Lazy-import boto3 and the Azure SDKs in the two credential plugins (#927).

Inherited Red Hat surface

☐ Remove the Insights project type, a scm_type the platform already refuses (#931).
☐ Remove the Insights credential kind, which nothing can have (#932).
☐ Remove the Insights inventory settings, which nothing reads (#933).
☐ Stop calling subscription.rhsm.redhat.com, which licensing.py does today (#948).
☐ Rename the TOWER_* settings, keeping aliases for a release (#940).

Serving HTTP

☐ Collapse nginx, uWSGI, daphne and supervisor onto one ASGI server, step one (#942).
☐ Turn on async views once ASGI gives numbers, ATOMIC_REQUESTS being the reason left (#964).
☐ Stream the job stdout download, which the view buffers into a web worker today (#972).

Logging and tracing

☐ Move external log shipping off rsyslog, keeping what its queue guarantees (#965).
☐ Instrument the dispatcher and the runner, which report nothing today (#966).

The dispatcher and the task manager

☐ Adopt dispatcherd, or own our copy of what AWX extracted into it (#953).
☐ Window the task manager's query: it loads every pending job each cycle (#922).

The API contract

☐ Let a caller opt in to expansion, instead of summary_fields in every row (#941).
☐ Generate the UI's types from the schema and fail CI on drift, so nothing is committed (#934).

Code shape and types

☐ Split serializers.py and the views by resource (#951).
☐ Replace 3,103 lines of per-model access classes with declarative permissions (#950).
☐ Type the configuration: 1,302 lines of defaults and 78 mutable settings (#947).
☐ Promote ty from advisory to blocking one package at a time, as each one comes clean (#937).

The UI

✅ Moved the UI suite onto Vitest, from Jest (#914).
✅ Vite replaced create-react-app in the UI build (#916).
✅ The UI converted from JavaScript to TypeScript (#919).
☐ Serve the UI statically, rather than through a Django template (#952).
☐ Code-split the UI: no React.lazy anywhere, so every screen ships in bundle one (#939).
☐ Move the UI's useRequest onto TanStack Query, for caching and dedupe (#954).
☐ Swap ace-builds for CodeMirror 6: one non-test file imports it, and it ships less (#944).
☐ Retire formik: a field layer replaces it, held to a contract written against it (#963).
☐ Retire styled-components: every definition becomes a stylesheet beside its component (#962).

Security and accessibility

☐ Set the security headers in the application, rather than on nginx (#935).
☐ Fail CI on an accessibility regression, through @axe-core/playwright (#936).
☐ Fix the violations that gate found in the page header (#945).

Supply chain

☐ Install UI dependencies with --ignore-scripts, since postinstall is the attack (#929).
☐ Attach an SBOM and provenance in stage.yml, then sign the digest with cosign (#938).
☐ Audit the dependencies in CI, advisory first, blocking once the backlog clears (#930).
☐ Pin certifi and ansible-runner to commits rather than @devel (#928).

AWX → Ascender rebranding

☐ Rename the awx folder on the controller to ascender.
☐ Rename awx-manage and /var/lib/awx in the operator's templates.
☐ Rename awx-manage and awx.main in the two installers' inline scripts.
☐ Rename awx-manage in ascender-k8s-install's migrate and restore roles.
☐ Rename awx.main.models and the path fixtures in ascender-collection.
☐ Rename the JOB_FOLDER_PREFIX cross reference in ascender-kit.

blaipr

@cigamit the first post asks what else belongs on the list, so I went through ctrliq/ascender and added everything it turned up to my post above, ticked where the work has landed, an empty box where it has not, and the pull request beside it once there is one. Happy to size any of them properly or drop the ones you do not want.

cigamit

Nothing on your list seems out of line for me. Migrating to ASGI has been high on my list for a while now. I originally left all the license code in there, as I wasn't sure if we wanted to use it internally for our supported version. But we don't, so we can start ripping it out and doing a general cleanup of that and insights.

I put in PR ctrliq/ascender920 for cleaning up the python dependencies.

Seems RH finally removed python-daemon (and lockfile) yesterday. Maybe my comment pushed them along considering that PR has been sitting there for 4 years untouched.
ansible/ansible-runner1054#issuecomment-5420953965

blaipr

@cigamit wow, you were able to get a four year old PR merged 😄

I will start working on all of the remaining points now. I want to have Ascender fully modernized the sooner the better. Then, you can review all my changes at once and release the next version when you're comfortable with the stability.