NetBox Zero To Hero - Video 7 - Automate All The things!

Hello and welcome to module 7 of the NetBox 'Zero-to-Hero' course. In this Video, Eric will use Ansible to extract data from NetBox and then use that data to automate the creation of basic device configurations for the WAN Router (Cisco IOS) and the Access Switch (Juniper JunOS), at the new Brisbane branch office.

By the end of this module you will be able to:
- Set up Ansible to use NetBox as the source of it's Dynamic Inventory
- Write Ansible playbooks to make REST API calls to NetBox and extract the required data to build the device configurations
- Automate the generation of device configuration files using Jinja templates, passing in the data extracted from NetBox as variables

## Get Hands On
If you'd like to follow along with the examples used in this course, it's super easy to do, and you have a few options:

The software versions used in the video for this module are:
- `NetBox v3.3.2`
- `Python v3.8.9`
- `ansible-core v2.13.4`
- `ansible package v6.4.0`
- `pynetbox v6.6.2`
- `netaddr v0.8.0`

## Installing Ansible

pip3 install netaddr

## Challenge - Improve The Jinja Templates
If you fancy a challenge why not develop these playbooks and templates further and improve them? Maybe you could add descriptions for the switch interfaces and add that logic to the JunOS templates? Maybe you could make them more efficient, or you could try using Nornir or Python instead of Ansible to pull data from NetBox and render the configs.

## Join the Discussion

## Useful Links

[dataolle]

Great content! Thanks for the examples, very useful.

[patrick.denessen]

Thanks, another good video, however I would mention the use of Ansible in the title and/or summary.

[InnocentMafukidze]

Hello there! Thanks for the training its very informative.
I have been following but, I think I missed the other piece of the puzzle.
I can generate device config files locally from my ansible cli, leveraging on the Netbox host_vars, the config_context and Jinja2 templates . Now that I have the config files in the configs directory, how then do I push those configurations into my devices? I already have access to the devices from the Ansible control machine.

[networkstuff]

Thanks for sharing, is possible to use the own netbox data to render the configuration within netbox gui ?

[anonymoussyaribogor]

Is there any information regarding this course that provide full courses