iRules Change Management

iApps + tmsh::expand_macro (added in 11.4 - needs some documentation here on devcentral) provide a nice way to make sure iRules are not modified in place. The strictness of iApps protects the iRules from user error (note that strictness can be turned off but not without some intentional button pressing) and the templating can provide an escape-free 'string map'-free iRule editing environment plus variable substitution, complex macro conditionals, and fantastic debugging.

I would be interested in building an iRule/iApp/iControl/iCall development VM someday around the idea of simplifying this.

Personally I have solved this problem many times in the past primarily with svn/vim/.vimrc/ssh/scp and tmsh load sys config merge file plus a script that I put on the dev F5 BIG-IP box called rerun-iapp. It's nice because you can run it with ssh and a key and with the '-d' flag it puts the lines of scriptd.out out to your terminal. Plus you can create several ASO instances of the template and it will rerun the template for all ASOs - allowing you to do potentially lots of testing quite quickly