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Automate Your Network

Automation Tools: Ansible

Explore how to use Ansible as an automation engine for network management. Learn to run playbooks, execute commands, and use check mode to validate network changes. Understand key features like the --limit option, idempotency, and ad hoc commands to streamline device management and configuration tasks.

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Ansible is the automation engine where playbooks are run, either in check mode or full execution mode. Running playbooks is as simple as creating a YAML file and running the ansible-playbook command in the Linux host.

The syntax for ansible-playbook is as follows:

ansible-playbook <playbook file name.yml> <options>

Some common options:

  • –ask-vault-pass: Ask for the vault password.

  • -C, --check: Do not make changes; instead, try to predict some of the changes that occur.

  • -D, --diff: When changing (small) files and templates, show the differences in those files; works great with --check.

  • -l SUBSET, --limit=SUBSET: Further limit selected hosts to an additional pattern. ...