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 ansible_user="admin" ansible_password="password"
fortigate01 ansible_host=192.168.190.131 ansible_user="admin" ansible_password="password"

[fortigates:vars]
ansible_network_os=fortinet.fortios.fortios

Write the playbook¶

in the example: test.yml we are going to modify the fortigate device’s hostname:

- hosts: fortigates
  connection: httpapi
  collections:
  - fortinet.fortios
  vars:
   vdom: "root"
   ansible_httpapi_use_ssl: yes
   ansible_httpapi_validate_certs: no
   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: module fortios_system_vmlicense allows you to upload the licence with http, in this case, you should set ansible_httpapi_use_ssl: no and ansible_httpapi_port: 80
Don’t specify host, username, password, https or ssl_verify under second level options(fortios_system_global in the above example)

Run the playbook¶

ansible-playbook -i hosts test.yml

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