Installation¶

You can install the experimental branch by building the execution environment (recommended), or directly from a tarball file. The direct installation of tarball file requires the removal of any existing installation of f5_bigip collection. Using the execution environment ensures all dependencies are installed and that your existing environment is unaffected.

Installing and running the collection from the execution environment¶

Use this section when installing from the execution environment. For instructions on installing directly from a tarball file, see Installing from a tarball.

Creating Execution Environment container¶

First, you must install the following packages:

For more information on the ansible-builder, see the Ansible Builder documentation.

ansible-builder
pip install ansible-builder

For more information on the ansible-builder, see the Ansible Navigator documentation.

ansible-navigator
pip3 install 'ansible-navigator[ansible-core]'

Next, create the following files:

execution-environment.yml

version: 1
dependencies:
  galaxy: requirements.yml
  python: requirements.txt

requirements.yml

---
collections:
  - name: ansible.netcommon
    version: ">=2.0.0"
  - name: f5networks.f5_bigip
    source: https://github.com/F5Networks/f5-ansible-bigip.git#ansible_collections/f5networks/f5_bigip
    type: git
    version: sslo

requirements.txt

netaddr
objectpath
isoparser
lxml
deepdiff

Once you have created these files, use the following command syntax from the same directory. If you placed the files somewhere else, refer to the Ansible Builder documentation for appropriate command switches.

ansible-builder build --tag <image_name> --container-runtime docker

For example:

ansible-builder build --tag sslo_image --container-runtime docker

Once the process is complete, the image should appear when running docker image ls command:

The ansible-builder needs to be rerun again only after the sslo branch has been updated, so the image building process will take less time on a subsequent run.

Running Playbooks from the execution environment¶

To execute the container against your playbooks, use the ansible-navigator.

You can optionally specify a number of the command line options in the ansible-navigator settings file to make the command more simple. See the Ansible Navigator documentation for more information.

The following command syntax assumes that no configuration file was created (or modified) for navigator after installation:

ansible-navigator run <your_playbook_path> --eei <image_name> --pp missing -i <inventory_path>

Installing from a tarball¶

Use the following to install the environment from a tarball. F5 recommends using the execution environment for installation.

Remember, direct installation of tarball file requires the removal of any existing installation of f5_bigip collection.

Download the daily build from AWS S3:

wget https://f5-ansible.s3.amazonaws.com/collections/f5networks-f5_bigip-experimental.tar.gz
Install the collection build that was downloaded:

ansible-galaxy collections install f5networks-f5_bigip-experimental.tar.gz