Practical Ansible 2

Enabling network automation

Before you can use Ansible for network automation, you need to make sure you have everything you need.

Based on the kind of connection method we are going to use, we need different dependencies. As an example, we are going to use a Cisco IOS device with network_cli connectivity.

The only requirements for Ansible network automation to work are as follows:

• Ansible 2.5+
• Proper connectivity with the network device

First, we need to check the Ansible version:

1. To ensure that you have a recent Ansible version, you can run the following command:

$ ansible --version

This will tell you the version of your Ansible installation.

2. If it's 2.5 or better, you can issue the following command (with the appropriate options) ...