Project · developer-tool
Holochain Playground
- How you run it
- not recorded
- Holochain version
- 0.5.0
- Activity
- maintained
- Checked
- 29 October 2026
What is Holochain Playground and what is it for?
Holochain Playground is a command-line tool that connects to Holochain nodes while they are running and lets developers look inside them. It exists so that developers building Holochain apps can watch what their nodes are actually doing during development.
Holochain Playground is a developer tool that lets you look inside Holochain nodes while they are running. It is a command-line program that connects to the admin interfaces of one or more conductors and shows you what those nodes are doing, so you can observe a test network in progress rather than infer it from logs. Darksoil Studio publishes it as a monorepo containing the CLI.
It is aimed at people building Holochain apps who need to see the parts of a node that are normally hidden during development. Local development setups often run several conductors at once, and the playground is written to be run alongside them: it attaches to conductors it can find, or to admin interface addresses you give it directly.
One common use is to start your conductors and then run the playground in the same folder, where it picks up the conductors launched by hc sandbox, hc spin or hc launch. You can also pass admin interface addresses such as ws://localhost:8888 explicitly. The repository README documents both the Nix and npm setup paths.
How to get it
From the command line
- Install it as a development dependency: npm install -D @holochain-playground/cli
- Add a playground script to package.json that runs holochain-playground, or run it directly with npx @holochain-playground/cli <admin-url>
- Point it at running conductor admin interfaces, for example ws://localhost:8888, or run it in the folder where your conductors were started.
Source: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@holochain-playground/cli
From the command line
- Run it directly with Nix from the repository, passing the admin interface addresses of your conductors.
- Or import holochain-playground into a flake and add inputs'.holochain-playground.packages.hc-playground to your development shell, which gives you an hc-playground binary.
- Then run hc-playground in the same folder where you ran hc sandbox, hc spin or hc launch.
Source: https://github.com/darksoil-studio/holochain-playground
Questions people ask
- What do I need to run it?
- The repository documents a Nix route — running it directly with nix run, or importing it into a flake to get an hc-playground binary — while the published CLI package documents installing @holochain-playground/cli as a development dependency and adding a playground script to package.json. source
- What does it connect to?
- It connects to the admin interfaces of running Holochain conductors, given as WebSocket addresses such as ws://localhost:8888, and it can also pick up conductors found in the folder where they were started. source
- Does it need a real conductor running?
- The CLI package describes it as connecting to a real running Holochain conductor and calls it useful as an introspection tool for understanding what is going on in your node. source
From 3 public sources, checked 23 September 2026.
Try Holochain Playground
- Code on GitHubOpen on GitHub ↗Last change 3 February 2026.
- Websitedarksoil.studio ↗
- ReleaseNo GitHub release recorded.
- The project's own files do not say how it is run.
Details & sources
Evidence
- Last change
- api.github.com/repos/darksoil-studio/holochain-playgroundlisted by a third party · seen since 20 October 2026 · github.repository@1
- Activity
- api.github.com/repos/darksoil-studio/holochain-playgroundlisted by a third party · seen since 20 October 2026 · liveness@1
Compatibility
- hdk
- 0.5.0 · fixture/Cargo.lock @ 5e85864
- hdi
- 0.6.0 · fixture/Cargo.lock @ 5e85864
- holochain-client
- —
- happ.yaml
- present · fixture/workdir/happ.yaml @ 5e85864
- web-happ.yaml
- present · fixture/workdir/web-happ.yaml @ 5e85864