f5devcentral/f5-cli repository overview

⁠Introduction

The F5 CLI provides a command-line interface (CLI) to various F5 products and services. It focuses primarily on facilitating consuming our most popular APIs and services, currently including BIG-IP (via Automation Tool Chain) and F5 Cloud Services.

Similar to other popular cloud shells, it is built on a python client library. For those looking to write custom automation scripts or workloads, one may choose to leverage the same python library it is built on (https://github.com/f5devcentral/f5-sdk-python⁠).

⁠Benefits

• Quickly access and consume F5’s APIs and Services with familiar remote CLI UX
• Configurable settings
• Include common actions in Continuous Deployment (CD) pipelines
• Prototyping
  • Test calls that may be used in more complex custom integrations using the underlying SDK
  • Supports discovery activities/querying of command-line results (for example, “list accounts” to find the desired account which will be used as an input to final automation)
• Support quick one-off automation activities (for example, leveraging a bash loop to create/delete large lists of objects)

⁠References

The F5 CLI is currently in early development and we want to hear from you! To provide feedback on CLI or this documentation, you can file a GitHub Issue⁠.

• Documentation: https://clouddocs.f5.com/sdk/f5-cli/⁠
• GitHub: https://github.com/F5Devcentral/f5-cli/⁠
• Where to file issues: https://github.com/F5Devcentral/f5-cli/issues⁠
• Maintained by: F5 Networks⁠

⁠Usage

⁠Run F5 CLI in Docker container

⁠Example: Run the F5 CLI interactively from inside the docker container

docker run -it -v "$HOME/.f5_cli:/root/.f5_cli" -v "$(pwd):/f5-cli" f5devcentral/f5-cli:latest /bin/bash

⁠Example: Run the F5 CLI container from your desktop using an alias

alias f5='docker run -it -v "$HOME/.f5_cli:/root/.f5_cli" -v "$(pwd):/f5-cli" f5devcentral/f5-cli:latest f5'

⁠Example: Run the F5 CLI container from your desktop using your PATH

Another shortcut to launch f5-cli is to create a file containing the following content in your system's PATH (ex. cat /usr/local/bin/f5 ).

#!/usr/bin bash
docker run -it --rm -e "F5_SDK_LOG_LEVEL=INFO" -e "F5_DISABLE_SSL_WARNINGS=true" -v "$HOME/.f5_cli:/root/.f5_cli" -v "$(pwd):/f5-cli" f5devcentral/f5-cli:latest f5 $@

• Notes:
  • This example also exports environment variables to set the log level and disable ssl warnings of the application.
  • Ensure that the config directory .f5_cli is mounted to the container so the container can authenticate and communicate properly with a target device.
  • To reference files (ex. named as3.json), make sure that the current directory is where the files are located. This will let the docker container mount the local directory onto the container "$(pwd):/f5-cli" and process the files with f5-cli container. ex.

f5 bigip extension as3 create --declaration as3.json

⁠Build F5 CLI Docker container locally

docker build -t f5-cli:latest .