Writing your playbooks

Once your modules are configured, and all requirements (be they Python module dependencies or device software ones) are met, it's time to start writing your playbook. This should be a simple task of following the documentation for the module. Let's suppose we want to reset the configuration on an F5 BIG-IP device. From the documentation, we can see that authentication parameters are passed to the module itself. Also, the example code shows the use of the delegate_to task keyword; both of these clues tell us that the module is not using the native SSH transport of Ansible, but rather one that is defined in the module itself. Thus, a playbook to reset the configuration of a single device might look something like this:

---
- name: reset an F5
  hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: false

  tasks:
    - name: reset my F5
      bigip_config:
        reset: yes
        save: yes
        server: lb.mastery.example.com
        user: admin
        password: mastery
        validate_certs: no 

In this case, we are using a textbook example from the documentation to reset our configuration. Note that as our hosts parameter only defines localhost, we do not need the delegate_to keyword, since the bigip_config module will be run from localhost only in this playbook.

In this way, we have automated a simple, but otherwise manual and repetitive, task that might need to be performed. Running the playbook would be as simple as executing the following command:

ansible-playbook -i mastery-hosts reset-f5.yaml

Naturally, to actually test this playbook, you would have to have an F5 BIG-IP device to test against. Not everyone will have this available, so, in the next section of this chapter, we will move on to demonstrate a real-world example that everyone reading this book can work with. However, the intent of this part of this chapter has been to give you a solid overview of integrating your network devices, whatever they may be, with Ansible. Thus, it is hoped that even if you have a device that we haven't mentioned here, you understand the fundamentals of how to get it working.