Chapter 5 Repository Structure — Automate Your Network, page 84

Commit these changes with a meaningful message such as “Initial folder structure”. Perform the first pull request and merge the folder structure and completed hosts.ini file into the master branch. Delete the working branch initial_repo_config.

Test any organizational processes, change controls, approvals, that have been put in place for network automation. Share the link and encourage others to clone the repository.

Move work item to “Completed”. Configuration The configuration folder should have subfolders by platform or operating system to scale and should hold more than just one type of configuration file. The configuration folder holds dynamically generated output that is the result of the documentation.yml playbook that will be written later in this book. Think of these files as intent-driven sources of truth and the result of the data models and templates being compiled. Using a folder to hold these files means having an offline version of the configurations that can be referenced. It also means having automated documentation that is updated after every change. It is another way to validate the commands syntax before pushing commands to a device.

configuration 
| 
---- ios 
     | 
      ---- ACCESS01.cfg 
      ---- ACCESS02.cfg  
      ---- ACCESS03.cfg 
      ---- DIST01.cfg 
      ---- DIST02.cfg 
      ---- CORE.cfg 
---- nxos 
     | 
      ---- DC01_7K.cfg  
      ---- DC02_7K.cfg 
      ---- DC01_5K.cfg 
      ---- DC02_5K.cfg 
---- big_ip  
 
Documentation 
 
This is another folder that contains all dynamic documentation files. These can be Markdown (.md) 
files, excel files (.csv), text files (.txt) or other documentation generated by the playbooks. It is important 
to remember that since all these files are part of the repository, they all have the same version controls, 
Git and TFS history, and other meta data as the other files in the repository.

This history can be used to view human-readable output in a Markdown or Excel format instead of trying to read the configuration centric view in the dynamic configuration files in the previous folder.