Ansible Runner

A VSCode extension that makes running Ansible playbooks as simple as clicking a button.

Ansible Runner adds a sidebar panel to VSCode that automatically detects playbooks in your workspace and lets you run, dry-run, or run with verbose output directly from the UI.

Features

• Automatically detects playbooks by scanning for .yml files containing tasks: or import_playbook
• Sidebar tree view with expandable playbooks and run actions
• Right-click context menu with Run, Run Verbose, and Dry Run options
• Auto-detects inventory.yml in the workspace root, or prompts you to select one
• Streams ansible-playbook output in real time to a dedicated output channel
• File watcher automatically refreshes the sidebar when playbooks are added or removed

Requirements

• Ansible must be installed and ansible-playbook must be on your PATH
• For playbooks using ansible.posix modules, the ansible.posix collection must be installed:

  ansible-galaxy collection install ansible.posix

Usage

Open a workspace containing Ansible playbooks. The Ansible Runner icon will appear in the activity bar. Click it to open the sidebar.

Running a playbook: Expand a playbook in the sidebar and click Run or Run Verbose.

Dry running a playbook: Right-click a playbook and select Dry Run Playbook.

Changing the inventory file: Either let the extension auto-detect inventory.yml in your workspace root, or set it explicitly in your workspace settings:

{
  "ansibleRunner.inventory": "/path/to/your/inventory.yml"
}

Passing extra flags to every run:

{
  "ansibleRunner.extraFlags": ["--diff"]
}

Extension Settings

Setting	Type	Default	Description
ansibleRunner.inventory	string	""	Path to inventory file. Leave empty to auto-detect inventory.yml in workspace root.
ansibleRunner.extraFlags	array	[]	Extra flags passed to ansible-playbook on every run.

Known Limitations

• Only the first workspace folder is scanned for playbooks in multi-root workspaces
• Playbook detection uses regex rather than a full YAML parser, so unusual formatting may cause a file to be missed

License

MIT