WARNING: This role can be dangerous to use. If you lose network connectivity to your target host by incorrectly configuring your networking, you may be unable to recover without physical access to the machine.

This roles enables users to configure various network components on target machines. The role can be used to configure:

• Loopback interfaces
• Ethernet interfaces
• Bridge interfaces
• Bonded interfaces
• VLAN tagged interfaces

This role requires Ansible 2.9.16 or higher, and platform requirements are listed in the metadata file.

The variables that can be passed to this role and a brief description about them are as follows:

network_interface:
  ethernets: []
  bonds: []
  vlans: []
  bridges: []
  loopbacks: []

Interface configuration.

network_interface_implicit_loopback

Whether to create configuration for loopback interface, see Loopback interface configuration.

network_interface_file_prefix

The prefix for interface configuration files. Default: ifcfg-.

network_interface_file_postfix

The postfix for interface configuration files. Default: ''.

network_interface_restart

Whether to restart interfaces.

network_interface_single_configuration_file

Where supported, whether to create single configuration file with all network settings, e.g. /etc/network/interfaces for ifupdown.

Only Debian systems and ifupdown backend is supported so far.

This role aims to be configuration backend-agnostic.

Variable network_interface_configuration_backend allows to force specific configuration backend.

Supported backends are:

• ifupdown (Debian, default)
• netplan
• rc (FreeBSD, default)
• systemd-networkd
• ifupdown2

Role assumes that for Linux there exists only one loopback interface "lo":

From .../drivers/net/loopback.c : /* The loopback device is special. There is only one instance per network namespace. */ ```

For Debians, default configuration for "lo" is created, unless network_interface_implicit_loopback is false:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

If additional configuration of loopback interface is necessary, set it in network_loopback_interfaces:

network_interface:
  loopbacks:
  - device: lo
    addresses:
      - 1.2.3.4
    backend:
      ifupdown:
        command_options:
          - /bin/true

TODO: additional loopback-like devices via "dummy" driver.

network_interface:
  ethernets:
  # Static IPv4 and IPv6
  - device: eth0
    addresses:
      - 192.0.2.2/24
      - 192.0.2.3/24
      - 2001:db8::2/64
    gateway4: 192.0.2.1 # set to "auto" to configure first address in subnet as gateway
    gateway6: 2001:db8::1
    backend:
      ifupdown:
        command_options:
        - "up /execute/this"
        - "down /execute/that"
    description: 'Ethernet 0"

  # DHCPv4
  - device: eth1
    dhcpv4: yes

Vlans can have arbitrary name:

network_interface:
  vlans:
  - device: vlan10
    link: eth1
    id: 10

On Debians it's enough to set the vlan device name, and interface will be created based on the name (see VLAN INTERFACES in man interfaces):

network_interface:
  vlans:
  - device: eth1.10

network_interface:
  bonds:
  - device: bond0
    interfaces:
      - eth0
      - eth1
    parameters:
      mode: 802.3ad
      mii-monitor-interval: 1

python-netaddr

BSD

This project was originally created by Benno Joy.

Debian upgrades by:

• Martin Verges (croit, GmbH)
• Eric Anderson (Avi Networks, Inc.)

RedHat upgrades by:

• Eric Anderson (Avi Networks, Inc.)
• Luke Short (Red Hat, Inc.)
• Wei Tie, (Cisco Systems, Inc.)

The full list of contributors can be found here.