Run Your First Playbook

This document explains how to run your first FortiOS Ansible playbook.

With FortiOS Galaxy collection, you are always recommended to run FortiOS module in httpapi manner. The first step is to prepare your host inventory with which you can use ansible-vault to encrypt or decrypt your secrets for the sake of confidentiality.

Prepare host inventory

in our case we create a file named hosts:

[fortigates]
fortigate01 ansible_host=192.168.190.130

[fortigates:vars]
ansible_network_os=fortinet.fortios.fortios
ansible_log_path=/tmp/ansible.network.log
ansible_user=admin
ansible_password=YOUR_OWN_VALUE
ansible_httpapi_session_key={"access_token":"YOUR_OWN_VALUE"}

FortiOS supports two ways to authenticate Ansible: ansible_user and ansible_password pair based; ansible_httpapi_session_key access token based. The access token method is preferred as it offers enhanced security by avoiding password exposure and ensures that requests originate from the intended source.

fortios_access_token is a way for authentication, and it will be deprecated in the future, please use ansible_httpapi_session_key instead.

for how to generate an API token, visit page FortiOS API Spec.

Write the playbook

in the example: test.yml is going to modify the FortiGate device’s hostname, please modify the variable values if needed.

- hosts: fortigate01
  connection: httpapi
  collections:
  - fortinet.fortios
  vars:
   vdom: "root"
   ansible_httpapi_use_ssl: true
   ansible_httpapi_validate_certs: false
   ansible_httpapi_port: 443
  tasks:
   - name: Configure global attributes.
     fortios_system_global:
        vdom:  "{{ vdom }}"
        system_global:
            hostname: 'CustomHostName'

there are several options which might need you special care:

  • connection : httpapi is preferred.

  • collections : The namespace must be fortinet.fortios

  • ansible_httpapi_use_ssl and ansible_httpapi_port: by default when your fortiOS device is licensed, the https is enabled. there is one exception: uploading vmlicence to a newly installed FOS instance, where you should set ansible_httpapi_use_ssl: no and ansible_httpapi_port: 80. Please see Import licence to FOS for more details.

Run the playbook

ansible-playbook -i hosts test.yml

you can also observe the verbose output by adding option at the tail: -vvv.