Ansible Playbook Grapher

If you use Ansible for automation, then you should be interested in a tool called Ansible Playbook Grapher which allows you to visualize the workflow of your playbooks.

I ran into a little trouble getting it to work initially, but eventually was able to output graphs for Meza.

Usage

The way to use ansible-playbook-grapher is to setup a Python Virtual Environment, so that you can install apg. Once it is installed, you can use it on a checkout of Meza by changing into the 'config' directory and invoking the script with optional arguments ansible-playbook-grapher --include-role-tasks ../src/playbooks/site.yml

By adding in the --open-protocol-handler vscode option, the nodes in the diagram will launch VSCode when clicked.

The command ansible-playbook-grapher --include-role-tasks --open-protocol-handler vscode ../src/playbooks/site.yml generates 'site.svg' in the current directory. You then view site.svg in your web browser.

# create a basic graph
ansible-playbook-grapher --open-protocol-handler vscode --title 'Meza site playbook' -vvv ../src/playbooks/site.yml

# Make the nodes collapsible
ansible-playbook-grapher --open-protocol-handler vscode --collapsible-nodes --title 'Meza site playbook' -vvv ../src/playbooks/site.yml


# Also graph the tasks (creates a much bigger graph)
ansible-playbook-grapher --include-role-tasks --open-protocol-handler vscode --collapsible-nodes --title 'Meza site playbook' -vvv ../src/playbooks/site.yml