Ansible Playbook Grapher

ansible-playbook-grapher is a command line tool to create a graph representing your Ansible playbook tasks and roles. The aim of this project is to quickly have an overview of your playbook.

Inspired by Ansible Inventory Grapher.

Pérequis

• Ansible >= 2.4: The script has not been tested yet with an earlier version of Ansible.

$ sudo pip3 install 'ansible>=2.4'

• graphviz: The tool used to generate the graph in SVG.

$ sudo apt-get install graphviz

Installation

$ sudo pip3 install ansible-playbook-grapher

Usage

$ ansible-playbook-grapher examples/playbook.yml

Some options are available:

$ ansible-playbook-grapher --help
usage: ansible-playbook-grapher [-h] [-i INVENTORY] [--include-role-tasks]
                                [-s] [-o OUTPUT_FILE_NAME] [-v]
                                playbook

Simple grapher for an Ansible Playbook. You will need to install Ansible,
graphviz on your system (sudo apt-get install graphviz). Has been tested with
Ansible 2.4.

positional arguments:
  playbook              The playbook to grah.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -i INVENTORY, --inventory INVENTORY
                        Ansible inventory. Useful if you want to have a
                        tooltip with hostnames on the play nodes.
  --include-role-tasks  Include the tasks of the role in the graph. Can
                        produce a huge graph if you have lot of roles.
  -s, --save-dot-file   Save the dot file used to generate the graph.
  -o OUTPUT_FILE_NAME, --ouput-file-name OUTPUT_FILE_NAME
                        Output filename without the '.svg' extension. Default:
                        <playbook_filename>.svg
  -v, --version         Print version and exit.

TODO

• More colors: For the moment, a random color is chosen from a set of defined colors for each play found in the playbook. Maybe generate some colors specific automatically for each play.
• Graphviz : properly rank the edge of the graph to represent the order of the execution of the tasks and roles
• Graphviz : find a way to avoid edges overlapping
• Ansible: Variables interpolation in node name (when possible)