Netconf Plugins

Netconf plugins are abstractions over the Netconf interface to network devices. They provide a standard interface for Ansible to execute tasks on those network devices.

These plugins generally correspond one-to-one to network device platforms. The appropriate netconf plugin will thus be automatically loaded based on the ansible_network_os variable. If the platform supports standard Netconf implementation as defined in the Netconf RFC specification the default netconf plugin will be used. In case if the platform supports propriety Netconf RPC’s in that case the interface can be defined in platform specific netconf plugin.

Adding netconf plugins

You can extend Ansible to support other network devices by dropping a custom plugin into the netconf_plugins directory.

Using netconf plugins

The netconf plugin to use is determined automatically from the ansible_network_os variable. There should be no reason to override this functionality.

Most netconf plugins can operate without configuration. A few have additional options that can be set to impact how tasks are translated into netconf commands. A ncclient device specific handler name can be set in the netconf plugin or else the value of default is used as per ncclient device handler.

Plugins are self-documenting. Each plugin should document its configuration options.