Enroll, a tool to reverse-engineer servers into Ansible config mgmt
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Happy new year folks!This tool was born out of a situation where I had 'inherited' a bunch of servers that were not under any form of config management. Oh, the horror...Enroll 'harvests' system information such as what packages are installed, what services are running, what files have 'differed' from their out-of-the-box defaults, and what other custom snowflake data might exist.The harvest state data can be kept as its own sort of SBOM, but also can be converted in a mere second or two into fully-functional Ansible roles/playbooks/inventory.It can be run remotely over SSH or locally on the machine. Debian and Redhat-like systems are supported.There is also a 'diff' mode to detect drift over time. (Years ago I used Puppet instead of Ansible and miss the agent/server model where it would check in and re-align to the expected state, in case people were being silly and side-stepping the config management altogether). For now, diff mode doesn't 'enforce' but is just capable of notification (webhook, email, stdout) if changes occur.Since making the tool, I've found that it's even useful for systems where you already have in Ansible, in that it can detect stuff you forgot to put into Ansible in the first place. I'm now starting to use it as a 'DR strategy' of sorts: still favoring my normal Ansible roles day-to-day (they are more bespoke and easier to read), but running enroll with '--dangerous --sops' in the background periodically as a 'dragnet' catch-all, just in case I ever need it.Bonus: it also can use my other tool JinjaTurtle, which converts native config files into Jinja2 templates / Ansible vars. That one too was born out of frustration, converting a massive TOML file into Ansible :)Anyway, hope it's useful to someone other than me! The website has some demos and more documentation. Have fun every(any)-one.
HN · launched Jan 1, 2026 · 265 upvotes (top 3%) · 2 views
Niche: software deployment and configuration tools · 165 launches, 6 in the last 7 days ▼ -68% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 165 launches in software deployment and configuration tools →
Could you build this?
Partial The CLI wrapper and basic templating are simple, but accurately reverse-engineering arbitrary Linux OS state into idiomatic, idempotent Ansible roles requires deep sysadmin knowledge of system internals.
What it would actually take: Requires building an agent/collector using Python (Paramiko) inspecting /etc, systemd unit definitions, package managers (dpkg/rpm databases), and diffing against vendor package baselines (e.g. dpkg -V or rpm -V). The hard part is reliably filtering noise, masking secrets, handling symlink/permission edge cases, and deduplicating package dependencies into idiomatic, reusable Ansible roles.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Jeff Geerling's Ansible Galaxy roles, Puppet agents, Chef
Concerns raised: Sudo password prompts on remote machines via SSH, Packages no longer available in repositories on new systems, Packages installed via dpkg -i not captured in harvest, Old system packages not installable on new systems, Sharp corner cases with file ownership and postinst scripts
Feature requests: Support for Apache and other services with special Ansible modules, Better handling of system-specific networking configuration, Jinja2 template support for Nginx and Apache conf files
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 53 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #2 of 54 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 41 days after the earliest competitor.
- ansible-collection-observability · github · 2026-09-24 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- install-2bg · github · 2026-10-24 · 22 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- ansible-collection-hashistack · github · 2026-09-23 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- ansible-collection-base · github · 2026-09-23 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- I built self-hosted deployment automation tool for Windows and IIS · hn · 2026-08-25 · 35 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Distr 2.0 · hn · 2026-02-10 · 101 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Deft-Intruder · hn · 2025-11-25 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Drop · hn · 2026-09-22 · 189 upvotes · similarity 0.36
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