Last December, I wrote a pretty ranty post explaining how Ansible release 12 broke (some?) network device configuration playbooks. The inevitable anonymous troll (why are they always anonymous?) couldn’t resist asking whether I opened an issue on GitHub. I didn’t (more about that later), but when the solution to that rant was “we’re deprecating using templates in src” parameter, I opened an issue arguing why that’s not a good idea.

That issue led to the idea of adding another parameter to something_config Ansible modules — the rendered content (as a string) — and then all quieted down until I got an email that the issue was closed as not planned.

To my pleasant surprise, that was just bad issue management. New versions of cisco.ios.ios_config and arista.eos.eos_config modules have content parameter, and a good explanation of why you should use it, and when templating the src parameter will be deprecated. I didn’t check more than a few modules, but I’m positive the Ansible team did a good job and added the same parameter to other device configuration modules. Nice job, thank you!