Ansible Inventory Browser

This project can parse ansible inventories and display them graphically on a webpage.

Features

• Parses Inventories
  • Some error, warning and messages about the inventory structur and concent will be displayed.
  • Generates one consistent data structure for the WebUI.
• WebUI
  • What can be seen on the WebUI:
    • Host list
    • Groups and hosts treeview
      • Hosts can appear in many groups when a host is selected all representations will be marked.
    • List of parser information
    • Whole structured WebUI data as JSON
    • Detail view which shows all information about selected hosts or groups
    • Graph Views realized with graphviz
  • Sort and filter function for all tables
  • Custom Columns in Host and Group View can be configured.
    • All attributes in the whole structure can be configured. (As example in the host view you can add a column about the iLO IP Address which is available but distributed in files called network under the folder host_vars.)

Planned features

• Make inherited values visible.
• Splitter btw tables and detail view.
• Ability to add custom functions which can convert or enricht information to be displayed.
• Autodetection if inventories change so that the structed data for the WebUI will be parsed again. (This shall be built-in the webserver part)
• Configuration of custom columns shall be dynamic and also possible after parsing the inventories so that a use can change them while browsing.
• WebUI for generating settings file

Browse through the example inventories

There are some example inventories within this project and their data for the webUI is pregenerated. If you want to check out how this tool works just:

• Clone this repository: git clone https://github.com/grimmpp/ansible-inventory-browser.git
• and open the /webpage/index.html

In order to check out the example inventories nothing except a browser is needed. The webpage consists of pure html and javascript and the data for the example inventories is pregenerated within the webpage folder.

This is how it will look like:

How it works

This project consists of:

• a tool - main.js which parses your inventories and generates structured data.
• a static webpage which shows the generated and structured data from the ansible inventories.
• a node.js server - server.js which can serve the webpage. (The webserver is optional because the whole webpage is static.) You can start the server with: node server.js and the webpage will be available under: http://localhost:5000
• a dockerfile which builds everything and starts the webserver so that you can test it consistently without having the need to install e.g. node.js.

Generate webUI data for your own inventories

To generate your own JSON data you can use the following command:

node ./main.js -c YOUR_CONFIG_FILE

Before generating the data you need to specify a settings file which contains the configuration about the data which shall be displayed, the location of your inventories, and some settings about how to prepare the information of the inventories. As example see the prepared configuration file of the example inventories.

Data for the example inventories can be generated with:

node main.js -c inventory.conf 

The output file will be written into /webpage/generated-data/data.js.

After generating the data you can browse it through on the webpage: /webpage/index.html

Running in Docker

For those of you who don't have node installed on their machine, you can run everything inside a Docker container.

How to build the docker image

First build the container for the inventory browser via

docker build -t ansible-inventory-browser .

How to run the docker container

You can then run the container to generate the data (as a one-off command) via

docker run -p 8000:8000 -d ansible-inventory-browser

Hint: If you use docker toolbox under windows don't forget to create a port-forward for the docker host VM. (8000->8000)

Browse your own Inventories

If you want to generated the data for your own inventories then just mount them into the container like this:

docker run -it \
 -v PATH_TO_YOUR_DATA:/extData \  # readonly is sufficient
 -e ANSIBLE_INVENTORY=/extData/myInventory.conf \
 -p 8000:8000 \
 ansible-inventory-browser

where

• -v PATH_TO_YOUR_DATA:/extData mounts the directory which contains your inventories so that the node process within the container can read the data. Readonly access is sufficient.
• -e ANSIBLE_INVENTORY=/extData/myInventory.conf defines the config file in which you defines the inventories to be parsed and how the webUI shall look like.
• -p 8000:8000 Makes the exposed webserver port inside the container available and maps it to the same port.
  Hint: If you use docker toolbox under windows don't forget to configure a port-forwarding for your docker host VM.

Afterwards, you can open http://localhost:8000 from your local machine in your browser.