Ansible Network Base

About

The Ansible Network Base Validated Content provides essential roles to manage network devices effectively. This content is designed to be platform-agnostic and supports a wide range of networking platforms, making it a versatile toolkit for network administrators and engineers.

This collection includes the following roles:

• list: Retrieve and display supported resources that can be managed.
• configure: Apply, validate, and manage network configurations.
• deploy: Ensure consistent configuration deployment across network devices.
• detect: Identify configuration drifts between desired and actual states.
• remediate: Automatically correct configuration drifts and restore compliance.
• gather: Collect facts and running configurations from network devices.
• persist: Save network device configurations and facts to local or remote repositories for backup or audit purposes.

Included content

Click on the name of a role to view its documentation:

Roles

Name	Description
network.base.list	Retrieve and display supported manageable resources.
network.base.configure	Apply, validate, and manage network configurations.
network.base.deploy	Deploy consistent network configurations.
network.base.detect	Identify configuration drifts and discrepancies.
network.base.remediate	Correct configuration drifts and restore compliance.
network.base.gather	Collect facts and running configurations from network devices.
network.base.persist	Save configurations and facts to local or remote repositories.

Requirements

• Requires Ansible
• Requires Content Collections
• Testing Requirements
• Supported platform collections:
  • arista.eos >= v9.0.0
  • cisco.ios >= v8.0.0
  • cisco.iosxr >= v9.0.0
  • cisco.nxos >= v8.0.0
  • junipernetworks.junos >= v8.0.0

Installation

To consume this Validated Content from Automation Hub, add the following configuration to your ansible.cfg:

[galaxy]
server_list = automation_hub

[galaxy_server.automation_hub]
url=https://console.redhat.com/api/automation-hub/content/validated/
auth_url=https://sso.redhat.com/auth/realms/redhat-external/protocol/openid-connect/token
token=<SuperSecretToken>

Utilize the current Token, and if the token has expired, obtain the necessary token from the Automation Hub Web UI.

With this configured, simply run the following commands:

ansible-galaxy collection install network.base

Use Cases

This collection includes platform-agnostic role that enables the users to perform following .

Build Brownfield Inventory:

• The persist role enables users to fetch facts for provided resources and persist these YAML formatted structured host-vars either to local or remote data stores which could act as a single SOT.

Configuration Deployment:

• The deploy role enables a user to read the host_vars from a local or remote data store and deploys if any changes are found.

Display Structured Configuration:

• The gather role enables users to be able to gather and display the structured facts for provided network resources.

Configuration Drift:

• The detect role will read the facts from the default/local or remote inventory host_vars and detect if any configuration changes are there between running and the provided config configuration.

Remediate Configuration:

• The remediate role will read the facts from the provided/default or remote inventory and remediate if there are any configuration changes on the appliances. This is done by overriding the running configuration with read facts from the provided inventory host vars.

Supported Resource Modules Query:

• The list role enables users to get the list of supported resource modules for the provided network OS.

Configure:

• The configure role enables the user to apply configuration in a normalized manner the way resource modules do.

Testing

The project uses tox to run ansible-lint and ansible-test sanity. Assuming this repository is checked out in the proper structure, e.g. collections_root/ansible_collections/network/base, run:

  tox -e ansible-lint
  tox -e py39-sanity

To run integration tests, ensure that your inventory has a network_base group. Depending on what test target you are running, comment out the host(s).

[network_hosts]
ios
junos

[ios:vars]
< enter inventory details for this group >

[junos:vars]
< enter inventory details for this group >

  ansible-test network-integration -i /path/to/inventory --python 3.9 [target]

Contributing

We welcome community contributions to this collection. If you find problems, please open an issue or create a PR against this repository.

Don't know how to start? Refer to the Ansible community guide!

Want to submit code changes? Take a look at the Quick-start development guide.

We also use the following guidelines:

• Collection review checklist
• Ansible development guide
• Ansible collection development guide

Code of Conduct

This collection follows the Ansible project's Code of Conduct. Please read and familiarize yourself with this document.

Release notes

Release notes are available here.

Related information

• Developing network resource modules
• Ansible Networking docs
• Ansible Collection Overview
• Ansible Roles overview
• Ansible User guide
• Ansible Developer guide
• Ansible Community Code of Conduct

Licensing

GNU General Public License v3.0 or later.

See LICENSE to see the full text.