Add tags grouping in NetBox dynamic inventory plugin

[remyleone]

SUMMARY

Add tags grouping for NetBox

ISSUE TYPE

• Feature Pull Request

COMPONENT NAME

• lib/ansible/plugins/inventory/netbox.py

ANSIBLE VERSION

ansible 2.8.0.dev0 (netbox_tag_grouping d7c57941bf) last updated 2018/09/17 18:04:31 (GMT +200)
  config file = None
  configured module search path = [u'/Users/sieben/.ansible/plugins/modules', u'/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
  ansible python module location = /Users/sieben/workspace/ansible/lib/ansible
  executable location = /Users/sieben/workspace/ansible/bin/ansible
  python version = 2.7.15 (default, Jun 17 2018, 12:46:58) [GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 9.1.0 (clang-902.0.39.2)]

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Now all group extractor returns a list of subgroups. Existing extractors return a list with a single element.

[s-hertel]

Why did you add all these manually rather than just extending constructed?

[remyleone]

@s-hertel I used what I knew. Do you have a tutorial exposing how to use constructed? I would like to see some examples in action.

[s-hertel]

Fair enough! I'm not sure of a tutorial, but a lot of plugins are using it - the Google inventory plugin, virtualbox, aws_ec2, openshift, openstack... among others. You can actually use constructed with this plugin as is (though you need to make sure either the constructed or auto inventory plugin is enabled and create a second config file). For example...

I'm not sure what a host from this plugin looks like, but say a host has a tags host variable that is a dictionary of key value pairs, this could be the constructed config:

plugin: constructed
keyed_groups:
  - key: tags  # the top level host var - you can also do more complicated things like 'security_groups|json_query("[].group_id")' where security_groups is a host var that is a list of dictionaries containing a group_id key
    prefix: tag  # the prefix for each of these groups - by default there is no prefix

That config will create tag_Key_Value groups. Or if you only wanted to create groups for each Name tag in the format Name_Value:

plugin: constructed
keyed_groups:
  - key: tags.Name
    separator: ""  # defaults to _, so set to an empty string to have no initial _ separator if there is no prefix

Now to see the groups: ansible-inventory -i netboxconfig.yml -i constructedconfig.yml --graph

Adding constructed to this plugin will let people keep those constructed options in the netbox config file.

plugin: netbox
# netbox options
# also constructed options, like `keyed_groups` or `compose`

Then if you decided to implement it wouldn't be a large diff. First, you’d want to add constructed documentation fragment:

DOCUMENTATION = '''
    ...
    extends_documentation_fragment:
      - constructed


Then you’d need to extend the base class so you can use the Constructable methods:

from ansible.plugins.inventory import BaseInventoryPlugin, Constructable
...
class InventoryModule(BaseInventoryPlugin, Constructable):

And then after adding each host to inventory you’d use use the constructed options to :


strict = self.get_options(‘strict’)

# Composed variables
self._set_composite_vars(self.get_option('compose'), host, hostname, strict=strict)


# Complex groups based on jinja2 conditionals, hosts that meet the conditional are added to group
self._add_host_to_composed_groups(self.get_option('groups'), host, hostname, strict=strict)

# Create groups based on variable values and add the corresponding hosts to it
self._add_host_to_keyed_groups(self.get_option('keyed_groups'), host, hostname, strict=strict)

And then you won’t forever be adding a steady stream of new groups since people can group by any host vars that they want.

[remyleone]

@s-hertel Could this PR and other be accepted first to have the feature available? I will open a PR to refactor the code using Contructable. I would like it to be a separate PR so it can be used as a PR reference for new inventory plugin that would showcase how to use it and refactor existing code. What do you think about it?

[remyleone]

@s-hertel Refactoring PR created

[remyleone]

Could this be merged?

[remyleone]

@gundalow Could this be merged?

[gundalow]

rebuild_merge