How to connect to RouterOS devices with SSH
The collection offers two modules to connect to RouterOS devies with SSH:
The community.routeros.facts module gathers facts about a RouterOS device;
The community.routeros.command module executes commands on a RouterOS device.
The modules need the ansible.netcommon.network_cli connection plugin for this.
Important notes
The SSH-based modules do not support arbitrary symbols in the router’s identity. If you are having trouble connecting to your device, please make sure that your MikroTik’s identity contains only alphanumeric characters and dashes. Also make sure that the identity string is not longer than 19 characters (see issue for details). Similar problems can happen for unsupported characters in your username.
The community.routeros.command module does not support nesting commands and expects every command to start with a forward slash (
/
). Running the following command will produce an error:- community.routeros.command: commands: - /ip - print
When using the community.routeros.command module module, make sure to not specify too long commands. Alternatively, add something like
+cet512w
to the username (replaceadmin
withadmin+cet512w
) to tell RouterOS to not wrap before 512 characters in a line (see issue for details).Finally, the ansible.netcommon.network_cli connection plugin uses paramiko by default to connect to devices with SSH. You can set its
ssh_type
option tolibssh
to use ansible-pylibssh instead, which offers Python bindings to libssh. See its documentation for details.
Setting up an inventory
An example inventory hosts
file for a RouterOS device is as follows:
[routers]
router ansible_host=192.168.2.1
[routers:vars]
ansible_connection=ansible.netcommon.network_cli
ansible_network_os=community.routeros.routeros
ansible_user=admin
ansible_ssh_pass=test1234
This tells Ansible that you have a RouterOS device called router
with IP 192.168.2.1
. Ansible should use the ansible.netcommon.network_cli connection plugin together with the the community.routeros.routeros cliconf plugin. The credentials are stored as ansible_user
and ansible_ssh_pass
in the inventory.
Connecting to the device
With the above inventory, you can use the following playbook to execute /system resource print
on the device
---
- name: RouterOS test with network_cli connection
hosts: routers
gather_facts: false
tasks:
- name: Gather system resources
community.routeros.command:
commands:
- /system resource print
register: system_resource_print
- name: Show system resources
debug:
var: system_resource_print.stdout_lines
- name: Gather facts
community.routeros.facts:
- name: Show a fact
debug:
msg: "First IP address: {{ ansible_net_all_ipv4_addresses[0] }}"
This results in the following output:
PLAY [RouterOS test with network_cli connection] *****************************************************************
TASK [Gather system resources] ***********************************************************************************
ok: [router]
TASK [Show system resources] *************************************************************************************
ok: [router] => {
"system_resource_print.stdout_lines": [
[
"uptime: 3d10h28m51s",
" version: 6.48.3 (stable)",
" build-time: May/25/2021 06:09:45",
" free-memory: 31.2MiB",
" total-memory: 64.0MiB",
" cpu: MIPS 24Kc V7.4",
" cpu-count: 1",
" cpu-frequency: 400MHz",
" cpu-load: 1%",
" free-hdd-space: 54.2MiB",
" total-hdd-space: 128.0MiB",
" write-sect-since-reboot: 927",
" write-sect-total: 51572981",
" bad-blocks: 1%",
" architecture-name: mipsbe",
" board-name: RB750GL",
" platform: MikroTik"
]
]
}
TASK [Gather facts] **********************************************************************************************
ok: [router]
TASK [Show a fact] ***********************************************************************************************
ok: [router] => {
"msg": "First IP address: 192.168.2.1"
}
PLAY RECAP *******************************************************************************************************
router : ok=4 changed=0 unreachable=0 failed=0 skipped=0 rescued=0 ignored=0