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nb2an: Netbox to Ansible

NetBox and Ansible both require a lot of manual configuration, often with duplicate information. Keeping them in sync can be a daunting challenge. The nb2an package provides utilities to map NetBox values to ansible host_vars using a simple mapping file.

Read the full documentation online

Installation

You can use pip or pipx to install the nb2an tools:

pipx install nb2an

Usage

Updating your ansible data from netbox requires the following steps.

Step 1: Create a nb2an configuration file

nb2an tools take a YAML-based master configuration file containing your netbox API token (which you'll need to get from your NetBox instance). In this configuration file you can set a number of variables. Note that some of these can be overridden with command line options.

# Your netbox API token:
token: YOUR_NETBOX_API_TOKEN

# what the API path is for your netbox install
api_url: https://netbox/api/

# domain suffix of your ansible FQDNs
# (nb2an tools will check NetBox for simple and full names)
suffix: .example.com

# where th eroot of your ansible code is stored
ansible_directory: /home/user/ansible

Step 2: create a YAML mapping file

The nb-update-ansible tool is designed to only update variables within your ansible host_vars that you ask it to, leaving everything else (including comments) the same. Note that formatting is overwritten by default, but see below for how to make a patch instead (actually TBD).

The YAML file consists of a host_vars YAML structure that you'd like to have updated. Currently this supports only dictionaries, but array support is coming shortly. The value of each variable should be a dotted notation of where to pull the information from in the netbox data for a given device. See the nb-device tool below for how to get a dump of a device for easier reading.

Here's an example mapping file, that updates or creates information in a host_info section and a netbox_info section.

host_info:
    serial_number: serial
    site: site.name
    location: location.name
    rack: rack.display
    position: position
netbox_info:
    id: id
    site_url: site.url

Step 3: Run nb-update-ansible

Note: don't forget to check in to your VC (git) any outstanding changes you have to your files in host_vars before running this tool.

$ np-update-ansible -c sample.yml
INFO      : modifying /home/user/ansible/host_vars/firewall.example.com.yml

$ cd /home/user/ansible/host_vars

$ git diff
diff --git a/host_vars/f1-lab.example.com.yml b/host_vars/f1-lab.example.com.yml
--- a/host_vars/f1-lab.example.com.yml
+++ b/host_vars/f1-lab.example.com.yml
+host_info:
+  serial_number: 00112233
+  site: MIA
+  location: DC9 Room Q
+  rack: Rack1
+  position: 40
+netbox_info:
+  id: 37
+  device_url: https://netbox/api/device/37/
+  site_url: https://netbox/api/dcim/sites/7/

Profit!

Note about YAML formatting changes

np-update-ansible currently reformats the YAML file with a standard yaml rewriter. Although it leaves comments in place, white-space changes will occur. You have two options to handle this:

  1. Allow the formatter (python's ruamel.yaml) to rewrite the YAML files, as use their formatter as style convention (similar to how much of the planet is shifting to black for formatting python code). One suggesting for starting with this is passing in an empty mapping file, or by using the -n flag, which has the same effect. Then check that in and make a second pass with a real mapping file in order to see what changes are actually made.

  2. Generate a diff from np-update-ansible -n mapping.yml and np-update-ansible mapping.yml and use the diff to view and apply changes. The recursive diff won't reformat much of the rest of the file because it'll only consist of changes only made by np-update-ansible.

    TODO: auto version of this coming...

Data access with the nb-* tools

The nb2an package contains a number of tools to access NetBox configuration from within a shell.

nb-racks: Display the racks from NetBox

Many later tools taken an option netbox rack number to evaluate. This tools gives you a numbered list of all your racks.

$ nb-racks
Id  Name                      Site                 Location             #devs
1   Rack1                     SEA                  DC1 Room 42          24
2   Rack2                     AMS                  DC2 Room 1           10
3   Rack3                     MIA                  DC9 Room Q            6

nb-devices: List the devices from Netbox

This tools lets all of the devices found in a rack, or if no rack number is specified, will list all the devices in NetBox. Devices will be listed in rack order from the top down, optionally with blank spots listed when -b is specified.

$ nb-devices 3
Id  Pos Name                      Type
40  40  firewall                  firewall-XX.YY
41  39  switch                    Cisco ZZ
42  38  webserver                 cpu2817
43  37  backend1                  cpu2817
44  36  database                  cpu2817
45  35  backend2                  cpu2817

nb-device:

nb-device dumps the details of a particular device, given its Id which can be found from the first column of nb-devices. This information will be critical when building a mapping file to be passed to np-update-ansible. The output is a YAML structured array.

$ nb-device 40
airflow: null
asset_tag: null
cluster: null
...
device_type:
  display: firewall-XX.YY
  id: 2
  manufacturer:
    display: firewall
    id: 2
...

nb-outlets:

Displays the outlets used in the rack by devices. This is unfinished (works but will change)

nb-networks:

Displays networks used in the rack by devices. This is unfinished (works but will change)

nb-check-ansible:

TBD