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 (for example, AWS CLI, Azure CLI, and Google gcloud), 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).

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.

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)

Table of Contents

• Quick Start
• User Documentation

Quick Start

Install F5 CLI with pip

pip install f5-cli
f5 --help

Run F5 CLI in Docker container

Example: Run the F5 CLI with docker container interactively

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 with docker container 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 with docker container from path

Another shortcut to launch f5-cli is to assign a file containing the following content in your system's PATH (ex. cat /usr/local/bin/f5). This example also set environment variable to set the log level and disable ssl warnings of the application.

#!/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:
  • To post a declaration, make sure that the current directory is at where the declarative files are located. This will let the docker container to mount the local directory onto the container "$(pwd):/f5-cli" and process the declarative files with f5-cli container.
  • Ensure that the config directory .f5_cli is mounted to the container so the container can authenticate and communicate properly with a target device.

Build F5 CLI Docker container locally

docker build -t f5-cli:latest .

User Documentation

See the documentation for details on installation, usage and much more.

Source Repository

See the source repository here.

Filing Issues and Getting Help

If you come across a bug or other issue when using the CLI, use GitHub Issues to submit an issue for our team. You can also see the current known issues on that page, which are tagged with a Known Issue label.

F5 CLI is community-supported. For more information, see the Support page.

Copyright

Copyright 2014-2020 F5 Networks Inc.

F5 Networks Contributor License Agreement

Before you start contributing to any project sponsored by F5 Networks, Inc. (F5) on GitHub, you will need to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA).

If you are signing as an individual, we recommend that you talk to your employer (if applicable) before signing the CLA since some employment agreements may have restrictions on your contributions to other projects. Otherwise by submitting a CLA you represent that you are legally entitled to grant the licenses recited therein.

If your employer has rights to intellectual property that you create, such as your contributions, you represent that you have received permission to make contributions on behalf of that employer, that your employer has waived such rights for your contributions, or that your employer has executed a separate CLA with F5.

If you are signing on behalf of a company, you represent that you are legally entitled to grant the license recited therein. You represent further that each employee of the entity that submits contributions is authorized to submit such contributions on behalf of the entity pursuant to the CLA.