Task 12 - Cleanup

Estimated Time to Complete: ~5 minutes

Before moving to CI/CD automation, clean up the manual work you've done so far. This ensures a clean starting point for the GitLab-based workflow.

What you'll learn

By the end of this task you will have:

• Run terraform destroy to remove all Terraform-managed configuration from the lab devices
• Understood why state separation matters - two Terraform environments fighting over the same devices produces unpredictable results
• Prepared a clean environment ready for the GitLab-driven workflow starting in Task 13

Why clean up?

In the previous tasks, you:

• Created configuration files manually in VS Code
• Ran Terraform commands directly from WSL Ubuntu
• Deployed configurations to the IOS XE devices

Starting from the next task, you'll use GitLab CI/CD pipelines to automate all of this. The GitLab repository already contains a complete project setup, so you need to:

1. Remove configurations from devices - Undo the changes made during manual tasks
2. (Optionally) Delete local files - You may clean up the manually created project folder as it's no longer needed

Step 1: Destroy Terraform resources

First, remove all configurations that Terraform deployed to the IOS XE devices. Open your WSL Ubuntu terminal.

Navigate to the project folder:

cd ~/nac-iosxe

Run Terraform destroy:

terraform destroy

When prompted, type yes to confirm. Terraform will:

• Connect to each IOS XE device
• Remove all configurations it previously applied (banners, ACLs, VLANs, etc.)
• Update the state file to reflect the clean state

Need to clean up just one device? Use managed_devices

terraform destroy unconfigures every device the module manages. If you only want to touch a subset, the Network as Code module exposes a filter variable - managed_devices - that restricts Terraform's scope to a specific list of device names. Every other registered device is left alone.

To use it, edit main.tf:

main.tf

module "iosxe" {
  source              = "git::https://github.com/netascode/terraform-iosxe-nac-iosxe.git"
  yaml_directories    = ["data/"]
  managed_devices     = ["core"]   # only core is in scope this run
}

The equivalent environment variable, useful for CI jobs without editing main.tf, is IOSXE_SELECTED_DEVICES=core (comma-separated for multiple).

managed_devices = [] (the default, or omitting the variable) means "all registered devices" - which is the behavior you're using in this lab.

Step 2: Verify Network as Code configurations are removed (optional)

You can use Solar-PuTTY to connect to one of the devices and verify the configurations have been removed. As you did in Task 01, double-click on the core switch to connect.

Once connected, check that the banner, hostname and other configurations you applied are no longer present. You can also check the running configuration.

show running-config

Step 3: Delete the local project folder (optional)

If you wish, you may also remove the manually created project folder, nac-iosxe, as it's no longer needed.

cd ~

rm -rf ~/nac-iosxe

ls -la ~/

Step 4: Close VS Code and WSL terminal

In the next tasks, you will no longer need VS Code and the WSL Ubuntu terminal. You can close both applications now.

What you've accomplished

• ✅ Removed all Terraform-deployed configurations from IOS XE devices
• ✅ (Optionally) deleted the manually created project folder
• ✅ Prepared a clean environment for CI/CD automation

Next steps

In the next task, you'll work with GitLab to:

• Use an existing project with pre-configured CI/CD pipelines
• Make changes through the GitLab Web IDE
• Let the pipeline automatically validate, plan, and deploy configurations

While manual Terraform commands are useful for learning and small-scale changes, in production environments you will typically use automated CI/CD pipelines to implement the Network as Code workflow.

← Previous: Task 10 - Schema validation · Next: Task 13 - Run a CI/CD pipeline