I built the Ansible tool I wish I had: A visual debugger and "Limits" sandbox

#webdev #ansible #devops #opensource

Why I built Ansible101

Every DevOps engineer knows the "Ansible Loop of Doom":

Write a complex Jinja2 filter or a --limit regex.
Run the playbook.
Wait for the connection...
Watch it fail because of a syntax error or an empty host list.
Repeat.

I got tired of the "trial-and-error" approach, so I built Ansible101 — a browser-only, zero-config visualizer and sandbox.

🚀 What it does

I wanted to solve three specific problems:

1. The "Tangled Web" Problem (Visual Flow)

It renders raw YAML into an interactive execution graph using ReactFlow. It includes a "Human-Speak" sidebar that translates technical modules into plain English one-liners.

2. The "YOLO-Limit" Problem (Limits Lab)

This is a dedicated sandbox where you can drop your inventory (INI/YAML/JSON) and test complex --limit patterns. You see exactly which hosts are matched by intersections (&), exclusions (!), or regex before you touch your production terminal.

3. The "Jinja2 Black Box" (Transformation Trace)

A live trace that breaks down filter pipelines step-by-step. If your string is mangled, you can see exactly which filter in the pipe caused it.

🔒 Privacy & Performance

The tool is hosted on Cloudflare Pages and is entirely client-side. No data ever leaves your browser, and it uses LZ-string compression to let you share the entire state of your "Lab" via a single URL.