Piping

Infrastructure context. Connections. Automation.

Keep your inventory, open remote sessions and run Ansible playbooks in one self-hosted workspace.

piping.space · Install · Contribute · License

From inventory to action

Infrastructure work rarely ends at a device record. Piping connects the inventory to the next step: finding a target, inspecting its context, opening a browser session or choosing the targets for an automation run.

🗂️ One inventory, several ways to explore

Keep devices, virtual machines, sites and IP addresses together. The Connections Workspace gives you a tree, cards, a table and a geographic Map for finding connection targets. A shared inspector keeps the selected target's details close as you move between views.

Use the Map for geographic context, the tree for grouped navigation, or the table when you need to scan a list. They are views of the same workspace, not separate inventories to maintain.

🖥️ Connect from your browser

Open SSH, RDP and VNC sessions from inventory targets without switching to a separate connection catalog. Keep the target's infrastructure context alongside the connection workflow, with access governed by roles and policies.

⚙️ Put the inventory to work

• Ansible automation: run playbooks against inventory targets
• NetBox integration: bring supported inventory into Piping through mapped imports and synchronization
• Monitoring discovery: feed your monitoring system with inventory-driven, Prometheus-compatible HTTP service discovery

🤖 Context and explicit permissions for AI agents

Use MCP and the API to give agentic systems infrastructure context. Grant inventory reads for a context-only workflow, or explicitly permit actions such as SSH execution on selected connection targets.

Token scopes limit actions and resources; the underlying roles and policies still apply. Scoped SSH actions run with the configured infrastructure identity and are recorded in the audit log.

Try the interface

The demo above shows the real frontend with synthetic public data. To explore it locally without a backend or credentials, follow Run the UI demo. Demo changes reset on reload.

Install

Requires Linux/amd64, Bash 4+, Docker with Compose v2, OpenSSL, Python 3.12+, GNU coreutils (realpath) and util-linux (flock and findmnt). Your user must be able to run Docker.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mlimarenko/piping/1.0.0/install.sh | bash

The installer downloads the release and its public container images, installs into ~/piping and serves Piping at https://localhost. The initial self-signed certificate needs browser trust; use a trusted certificate for a shared service. Find the administrator password in the installation's private .env file. Keep that file and the installation's data safe; rerunning the installer cannot recover lost secrets.

Run ~/piping/install.sh --help for hostname, port and image options. Rerunning the installed script starts the configured stack; it does not automatically upgrade images. Explicit image updates use the guarded backup and migration flow. If an update fails, inspect its private backup and journal before attempting recovery.

Development and contributions · Desktop client · License