Forward Enterprise documents, searches, verifies, and predicts the behavior of your network by creating an always-accurate software copy of your entire network infrastructure for both on-premises and cloud deployments.

This repository includes the following Ansible modules to automate interactions with a Forward Enterprise instance:

forward_check: Add/Remove/Verify a provided check
forward_network: Get networks from Forward instance
forward_snapshot: Collect a new snapshot for a given network, or upload a previously saved one

The instructions below explain how to install the main pre-requisite (the fwd-api Python bindings), then set up a Forward properties file.

DISCLAIMER: All the code in this repository is distributed with no warranty and no support from Forward Networks.

Install the `fwd_api` python module

Get the fwd-api submodules

The fwd-api is a submodule of fwd-ansible. Run the following git command and move to the fwd-api directory:

git submodule update --init --recursive  
cd deps/fwd-api

Install the python module

You can either scope the installation of the fwd_api python module to a virtual environment or install it system-wide. The first is recommended.

Installing in a virtual env

Install virtualenv

   pip install virtualenv

From the fwd-api directory, create a virtual environment for Python:

   virtualenv fwd_virtual

This should produce a folder named fwd_virtual. Use the virtual environment by calling:

   source fwd_virtual/bin/activate

From this same terminal, follow the instructions in the system-wide instructions.

Installing system-wide

fwd-api depends on python's request module.
To get it, use pip:

   pip install requests

After installing requests, use setup.py to install the fwd_api module. From the fwd-api directory, run the install script and return to the original top-level repository directory:

   python setup.py install
   cd ../..

Set up local properties file

Set up properties file from the sample

    cp fwd-ansible.properties.sample fwd-ansible.properties

Fill in the content to match your Forward instance and network:

url = <Forward Enterprise url>  
username = <username>  
password = <password>  
network_name = <Network name>

Forward modules may take a 'properties_file_path' option to enable overriding the default location: properties_file_path: <path to properties file>

Note: If a property is both in the properties file and passed to an Ansible module, the property passed to the Ansible module will take a higher priority.

Try out examples

Check the playbooks in the examples directory to get started.

For example, we recommend:

     cp examples/network.yml .
     ansible-playbook network.yml

... to see a list of networks for your user account.

Provide Feedback

If you're interested in using these modules or have any feedback, please let us know at info@forwardnetworks.com.

We're making this code available to enable early feedback, so that these modules might be more actively developed, tested, and even officially supported.

forwardnetworks/fwd-ansible

Install the fwd_api python module