Cliconf plugins are abstractions over the CLI interface to network devices. They provide a standard interface for Ansible to execute tasks on those network devices.
These plugins generally correspond one-to-one to network device platforms. Ansible loads the appropriate cliconf plugin automatically based on the ansible_network_os variable.
You can extend Ansible to support other network devices by dropping a custom plugin into the cliconf_plugins directory.
The cliconf plugin to use is determined automatically from the ansible_network_os variable. There should be no reason to override this functionality.
Most cliconf plugins can operate without configuration. A few have additional options that can be set to affect how tasks are translated into CLI commands.
Plugins are self-documenting. Each plugin should document its configuration options.
These plugins have migrated to collections on Ansible Galaxy. If you installed Ansible version 2.10 or later using pip, you have access to several cliconf plugins. To list all available cliconf plugins on your control node, type ansible-doc -t cliconf -l. To view plugin-specific documentation and examples, use ansible-doc -t cliconf.
See also
An overview of using Ansible to automate networking devices.
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https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.11/plugins/cliconf.html