# 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

1. 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.

2. 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

3. When using the community.routeros.command module module, make sure to not specify too long commands. Alternatively, add something like `+cet512w` to the username (replace `admin` with `admin+cet512w`) to tell RouterOS to not wrap before 512 characters in a line (see issue for details).

4. The ansible.netcommon.network_cli connection plugin uses paramiko by default to connect to devices with SSH. You can set its `ssh_type` option to `libssh` to use ansible-pylibssh instead, which offers Python bindings to libssh. See its documentation for details.

5. User is not allowed to login via SSH by password to modern Mikrotik if SSH key for the user is added!

## 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