Network Automation Cookbook

How it works...

We can extend the filter library provided by Ansible and create a custom filter using Python. In order to implement our custom filter, we create a folder called filter_plugins under our project directory, and we create a Python script with any name (we used filter.py in our example).

The custom Python filters must be placed in a folder called filter_plugins in order for Ansible to pick up these filters and process them.

Inside this Python script, we create a Python class called FilterModule. Inside this class, we declare a function named filters that returns a dictionary of all our custom filters that we define. We then start to create our filter by declaring a function called acl_state that takes the acl_def variables (which ...