Question

A network engineer must deploy a standardized extended ACL to 40 IOS-XE routers using Ansible. The ACL entries vary per site and are defined as a list of dictionaries (each with fields like sequence, action, protocol, source, and destination) in group_vars. The engineer wants to render the full ACL configuration dynamically from this data and push it via a single task, avoiding hard-coded CLI lines. Which approach best meets this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Use a Jinja2 template with a for loop over the ACL list and deliver it with the cisco.ios.ios_config task using the src parameter

Answer

Write each ACL entry as a separate cisco.ios.ios_config task using the lines parameter and hard-code the values per router

Answer

Store the ACL entries in a CSV file and use the shell module to cat them onto the device console

Answer

Use the set_fact module to concatenate all entries into one string, then pass it to the raw module