automate deployment

[camepp]

I'm looking for a way to automate the install and config of our pfsense appliance(s).

Has anyone had any experience using either the ECL with a custom config.xml, or using the PHP shell commands (with ansible or something like that), to get a zero-touch deployment working?
Even better - has anyone done this in AWS? Or with Terraform?

I found an old post with this question, but it didn't have any responses, so I'm making a new one.

[SteveITS]

@camepp I thought about just doing a restore once but a few defaults differ on different Netgate models, sometimes (power settings, etc.) Plus we tweak a few things from time to time. If it was more consistent hardware/VM it would probably be easier.

If you do this be careful not to restore SSH/ACB keys.

[camepp]

@SteveITS We are working with the AWS pfsense appliance, so we can be confident that the basic configuration will be stable (unless I add NICs or something like that).

Our goal is to be able to deploy or restore the firewall without a human having to log in to load a backup file or look up a password or anything like that - just have the config.xml available and loaded automatically.