Rick Donato

Jinja Tip: Use Jinja's map to extract specific values from a list of dictionaries. Perfect for pulling out IPs, interfaces, or other attributes within your Jinja templates or Ansible playbooks. Example below: # Input data interfaces: - { device: 'spine1', interface: 'GigabitEthernet0/0', ip: '10.

git diff lets you compare changes between commits, branches, or specific files. It also offers options for summaries and detailed file changes. Here are a few examples: # Compare Changes Between Commits git diff <commit1> <commit2> # Compare changes between two commits. git diff <commit1> <

When troubleshooting Ansible settings, use ansible-config dump --only-changed to show only configurations that differ from the default. It reveals the source of the change, whether it's from a config file or an environment variable. Here's an example 👇 $ ansible-config dump --only-changed # Output: # CONFIG_FILE() = /home/rick/ansible-examples/

pyATS Tip: Use pyATS APIs, like get_platform_memory_usage() , to easily retrieve device performance metrics, such as memory usage, from network devices, which you can later use within your test cases. Example below 👇 from genie import testbed testbed = testbed.load("testbed.yml") device = testbed.devices["leaf1&

Ansible Resource Modules offer various states to manage network configuration sections effectively. For example use parsed to convert configurations into structured data, like so: --- - name: Ansible Modules - Resource Modules (Parse) hosts: leaf1 gather_facts: false tasks: - name: Parse the provided configuration cisco.ios.ios_l3_interfaces:

What is JSONata? Dealing with nested JSON can be challenging—looping, complex key lookup chains, etc. Though there are various options out in the community for easing this pain, the one project I always enjoyed was JSONata. It's easy to use and has strong transformation features—something lacking

pyATS Tip: Customize SSH directly within the pyATS testbed using ssh_options. Ideal when needing to alter the algorithms used when connecting to older devices. Here is an example 👇 devices: leaf1: alias: leaf1 connections: cli: ip: 172.29.151.100 protocol: ssh ssh_options: -o KexAlgorithms=+diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 -o HostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-rsa

Python Tip: Use product from itertools to flatten your nested for loops. Here is an example 👇 devices = ["192.168.1.1", "192.168.1.2", "192.168.1.3"] interfaces = ["Gi0/1", "Gi0/2", "Gi0/3"] # -- Using

Within this post we will step through how to create a CSV file within Ansible. But before we do ... What is a CSV File Used For? A CSV (Comma Separated Values) file is a simple text format for storing tabular data. It's widely used because of its straightforward