Add plugins module.

[pszulczewski]

Proposal of dynamic plugins module.

This approach for plugins is slightly different than nautobot core modules, which have all endpoints statically added in the code. Looking at the variety of plugins/apps ecosystem I think that following the same patterns for plugins endpoints (a module for each endpoint) would be impractical, tedious to develop and hard to maintain in the future.

This proposal assumes that, plugin(plugin base_url), endpoint and object attributes are given in by users in ansible playbook task. Object attributes are split into two module args:

1. id where object identifiers like name, slug etc. for endpoint.get(**id) are given as k:v pairs
2. attrs where extra k:v pairs are given for creating or updating an object

Error handling is done by backend pynautobot and error message is returned in ansible task msg key.

Still TODO if these modules are welcomed:

• Extend d-compose nautobot with a plugin.
• Add integration test for the module.

[jvanderaa]

Loving what I'm seeing here. The only thing I'm not quite sure on yet is the id field. Would be good to come up with another name here. I was thinking data, but that is a previous module implementation detail. So would like to get something else.

[pszulczewski]

Loving what I'm seeing here. The only thing I'm not quite sure on yet is the id field. Would be good to come up with another name here. I was thinking data, but that is a previous module implementation detail. So would like to get something else.

This part identifies an object. We can have, name, slug as well other non-standard names like in case of bgp plugin asn - see integration tests.
I was thinking that id - identifier is short and clear about what it is. data is ambiguous IMO.

If you don't like id please give a specific name to replace and I will change it.
For me it can even be something_else :)

[joewesch]

I also like the idea here, thanks. This seems like something that should definitely be included.

I also don't like just id, but I could be ok with an alias. Also, since it can take multiple identifiers can we make it plural?

  identifiers:
    aliases: [ids]

Lastly, can we possibly add a test to make sure we can account for nested plugin endpoints like we did for pynautobot? That may require adding the data-validation-engine plugin as well to the test environment as that is the only plugin I am aware of that uses them.

[pszulczewski]

Thanks for the comment @joewesch. I like that. 👍

[pszulczewski]

Lastly, can we possibly add a test to make sure we can account for nested plugin endpoints like we did for pynautobot? That may require adding the data-validation-engine plugin as well to the test environment as that is the only plugin I am aware of that uses them.

I don't think we need that, as data-validation plugin has been standardized in the latest release 2.0.
see: nautobot/nautobot-app-data-validation-engine#29
Fixes API routes to be standardized (breaking change).
https://github.com/nautobot/nautobot-plugin-data-validation-engine/pull/29/files#diff-ad3b32d6e4e86b8fa1f80a5e6cad8f0eada338d217eb0f98c8d466de1eb6483d