Is it possible to import/export a config file directly into the client library?

[Wildcarde]

While I'm eventually planning to interact with a pfsense box directly I'm currently exploring mixing cobbler and this toolset to help automate some work in my compute cluster backend. While I'm working on that being able to simply output a config.xml instead of having to have a pfsense machine to talk to would be very helpful.

[ndejong]

Pardon the delay in responding.

The challenge you are facing here is close to the root of the original motivation for putting the pfSense FauxAPI together in the first place. It was (and still is) really quite painful to generate in a pure Python way a full pfSense config.xml file that remains compatible throughout version upgrades etc.

Best thing I can recommend is to take a look at the pfSense codebase and forklift out the functions dump_xml_config and parse_xml_config which confusingly in the pfSense codebase have 2x implementations that yield different results.

You'll be wanting to use the implementations found in /etc/inc/xmlparse.inc not the implementations in xmlreader.inc

I've not tried this approach myself but a quick review of xmlparse.inc does not not show any external includes so there is a decent chance you should be able to get it to run standalone albeit as an item of PHP code that will need to be run in whatever you are putting together.

Also worth noting that FauxAPI uses these pfSense functions to confirm the configuration supplied is valid essentially by doing this:-

config === parse_xml_config(dump_xml_config(config))

... which you can see happening here