You're reading from Network Automation Cookbook Over 100 recipes to effectively configure and manage network infrastructure with Ansible

Product type Paperback

Published in Aug 2025

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781835887981

Length 566 pages

Edition 2nd Edition

Languages

Python

Tools

Ansible

Concepts

Networking

Authors (3):

Christian Adell

Jeffrey Kala

Okasha

View More author details

Table of Contents (23) Chapters

Preface

1. Part 1: Getting Started with Ansible FREE CHAPTER

2. Why Ansible for Network Automation?

3. Building Blocks of Ansible

4. Advanced Ansible Concepts

5. Part 2: Managing Network Infrastructure with Ansible

6. Building Data Center Networks with Arista

7. Automating a Juniper Network Core Using Ansible

8. Managing Nokia SR Devices Using Ansible

9. Administering a Multi-Vendor Network with NAPALM and Ansible

10. Part 3: Managing Cloud Networking with Ansible

11. Deploying and Operating AWS Networking

12. Deploying and Operating Azure Networking

13. Deploying and Operating GCP Networking

14. Part 4: Integrating Ansible

15. Network Validation with Batfish

16. Building a Network Inventory with Nautobot

17. Simplifying Automation with AWX

18. Event-Driven Automation with Ansible

19. Terraform and Ansible Dancing Together

20. Index

21. Other Books You May Enjoy

Appendix - The Lab

Using Jinja2 templates with Ansible

Jinja2 is a powerful templating engine for Python and is supported natively by Ansible. It can also be used to generate any text-based files, such as HTML, CSV, or YAML. In this recipe, you will utilize Jinja2 with Ansible variables in order to generate custom CLI configuration files for network devices. It is important to become familiar with Jinja2 as it has become the de facto templating language for network automation.

Note

Jinja2 is a robust templating language that is heavily used in Ansible; however, this book doesn’t intend to teach Jinja2 in deep detail. For more information on Jinja2, visit the documentation: https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/stable/.

In the Using Ansible loops section, we defined the ntp variable. Now, let’s use this data and create a configuration snippet for NTP configuration for two Arista cEOS devices.