Ansible Toolkit

Description

Ansible is a neat infrastructure management tool, but it sometimes feels like the only way to to find out what's going to happen when you run things is to... run them. That's time consuming and potentially dangerous.

Ansible Toolkit hopes to solve that by providing some simple additional visibility tools.

Setup

Just pip install it.

pip install ansible-toolkit

Configuration

If you are using vault files, you will need to set up a config file in ~/.atk pointing to your vault password file:

[vault]
password_file = ~/.vault

By default, inventory will be read from the path inventory, relative to the directory an Ansible Toolkit command is run from. To override:

[inventory]
path = /home/foo/inventory

Optional Arguments

If you have multiple Ansible inventories or password files, or for whatever reason do not wish to set up a configuration file, the configuration can be optionally passed on the command line:

-i, --inventory
-p, --vault-password-file

Tools

atk-show-vars

You can display a list of all variables affecting a host, with a diff of each when they are overridden by a subgroup.

$ atk-show-vars host
Group Variables (all)
 + ['foo'] = 3
Group Variables (sub-group)
 - ['foo'] = 3
 + ['foo'] = 5

atk-show-template

You can display what the output of a template will be when applied against a host. For instance, if this were the template:

template_key = {{ template_var }}

And the value of template_var was set to 3 for host, the output would be:

$ atk-show-template host roles/foo/templates/template.j2
template_key = 3

Optional Arguments

• --no-gather-facts - disable fact gathering on host

atk-vault

With a large amount of vaulted ansible files, encrypting can take a while and grepping can be tedious.

atk-vault allows you to mass decrypt your vault files, do some work, and re-encrypt when done. Encrypted files that are changed while the vault is open will be updated upon re-encryption.

To open the vault:

$ atk-vault open

To close the vault:

$ atk-vault close

When the vault is opened, the original encrypted files will be stored in .atk-vault. You may wish to add this to your version control system's ignore file.

It's important that the vault always be opened and closed from the base directory of your ansible project. Newer versions may attempt to detect and force this by default.

atk-git-diff

Doing a git diff on encrypted files produces some pretty useless output.
atk-git-diff will detect changes via git diff, unencrypt the before and after, and show the difference.

This:

Becomes:

Contributing

There's probably a few things here that are too narrow and will only work on my team's platform / setup. If you run into any obvious problems / limitations please create an issue. If people start using this, I'll be happy to make it work for more environments.

Changelog

Please visit the Releases page.