This repository has been archived and the content has moved to the following new home: https://github.com/NSO-developer/nso-ansible-demo Please go there for a more recent and better version of the demo.

This is an introduction on how to setup a small development environment with NSO and Ansible, including a couple of simulated devices and exercise the three NSO modules (nso_action, nso_verify, and nso_configure).

You need both the NSO and Ansible environments setup, meaning you need $NSO_DIR to point to an NSO installation and have ansible-playbook(1) in your $PATH.

You will need two working directories, one for the NSO runtime files, and one for the Ansible playbook content.

If you are running the local fork of Ansible, you need to source hacking/env-setup. Please see hacking/README.md in the ansible source for more details.

Use the ncs-netsim(1) tool to prepare to simulate a network consisting of three instances of simulated junos, and cisco IOS-XE.

ncs-netsim create-network juniper-junos 3 jnpr
ncs-netsim add-to-network cisco-ios 3 xe
ncs-netsim start

This creates all the required files for starting the simulated instances and starts the devices.

ncs-netsim cli-c xe0
ncs-netsim cli jnpr0

Next is to set up the local NSO runtime environment and start it.

ncs-setup --dest .
ncs -v --foreground

Start the NSO CLI in a separate terminal.

ncs_cli -u admin
show configuration devices device
show configuration devices <tab>

Quick look at the documentation for the modules:

ansible-doc -l | grep nso_
ansible-doc nso_config
ansible-doc nso_verify
ansible-doc nso_action

And use Ansible to bring NSO in sync with the network:

cd devices-playbooks
ansible-playbook -v sync-from.yaml

Now that we are in sync, we can start fetching data from NSO to use in our playbooks. The following commands shows you how to fetch some configuration data from the jnpr0 device, how to run the same data through the json2yaml.py tool producing the exact YAML output that can be used in the next step.

curl -s -u admin:admin -H "Accept: application/vnd.yang.data+json" http://localhost:8080/api/config/devices/device/jnpr0/config?deep
curl -s -u admin:admin -H "Accept: application/vnd.yang.data+json" http://localhost:8080/api/config/devices/device/jnpr0/config?deep| ../json2yaml.py

Paste the output into verify-device-tmpl.yaml under the line with the device name. Remember to indent correctly.

You can then run the following to verify that the configuration indeed hasn't changed.

ansible-playbook -v verify-device-tmpl.yaml -e device=jnpr0

We can now make a change the configuration and run the verify playbook again and look at the delta. First we change the configuration of jnpr0 through the NSO CLI:

admin@ncs% configure
admin@ncs% set devices device jnpr0 config junos:configuration system domain-name baz.com
admin@ncs% commit

And then rerun the verify-playbook to find the deviation.

ansible-playbook -v verify-device-tmpl.yaml -e device=jnpr0

Let's create the corresponding configuration template and enforce the configuration. Paste buffer into configure-device-tmpl.yaml under line with device name (remember to indent accordingly).

ansible-playbook -v configure-device-tmpl.yaml -e device=jnpr0

Recheck to make sure the deviation is gone.

ansible-playbook -v verify-device-tmpl.yaml -e device=jnpr0

That concludes this simple demo. Feel free to suggest additional steps.

Here are the steps to completely reset the runtime environment such that you can start fresh from the top of this demo.

ncs --stop
ncs-setup --reset
ncs-netsim stop
ncs-netsim delete-network
rm -rf packages state target scripts logs ncs-cdb storedstate netsim README.netsim README.ncs ncs.conf