Steampunk Spotter Visual Studio Code extension

Steampunk Spotter is the shift-left governance platform and AI guardrail for Ansible Playbooks and Terraform configurations. It enforces policy, compliance, security and version checks deterministically, so only code that meets your organization’s standards reaches production, whether an engineer or an AI tool wrote it.

The Steampunk Spotter VS Code extension brings these checks into your editor. Scan Ansible content such as playbooks, roles, collections and task files, as well as Terraform configurations, as you write, and fix issues automatically before you commit.

Installation

You can install the extension from Visual Studio Marketplace or Open VSX Registry. The extension requires a Steampunk Spotter user account and the Steampunk Spotter CLI installed in the console that you use with VS Code. You can adjust the path to the Steampunk Spotter CLI in the extension settings. When you first activate the extension action, you will be prompted to log in with your Steampunk Spotter account.

Usage

The extension currently supports the following actions:

• adjusting settings such as Steampunk Spotter CLI path and scanning events,
• running separate commands,
• scanning and rewriting files and folders by right-clicking in the explorer,
• scanning and rewriting files and folders by right-clicking in the editor,
• scanning and rewriting the whole workspace,
• scanning on different events (on file change, on file save, etc.).

Scanning

Right-click and choose "Steampunk Spotter: Initiate a new scan."

A list of identified errors, warnings, and hints is provided with links to the module documentation.

Automatic fixing

The rewrite function can automatically fix many errors. Right-click and choose "Steampunk Spotter: Rewrite files with fixes". This will update the document to apply Spotter's suggestions, fixing multiple errors.

Scanning a directory structure

Right-click on a directory in the Explorer part of the side bar and choose "Steampunk Spotter: Initiate a new scan."

Automatic scanning on file save

To enable automatic scanning of the edited files on each save, visit the extension's settings and enable the "On Did Save Text Document" event.

Development

Use the commands below to develop and publish the VSC extension.

# install Node JS from https://nodejs.org/en/download/
# and test it with node -v and npm -v command

# install prerequisite packages
npm install

# test the plugin in VS Code (this will open a new window with your extension loaded)
press F5 (Run Extension)

# package and publish the extension
# if you don't have npx install it with: npm install npx
npx vsce package

Next steps

Please refer to the Steampunk Spotter Documentation for a more comprehensive usage.

Acknowledgement

This tool was created by XLAB Steampunk, IT automation specialist and leading expert in building Enterprise Ansible Collections.