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.
.._using_cliconf:
Using cliconf plugins
------------------------
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.
These plugins have migrated to collections on `Ansible Galaxy <https://galaxy.ansible.com>`_. 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``.
