Connecting to a wifi network with netplan

How do you connect to a a wifi network with netplan?

I hang out on the #netplan IRC channel on Freenode, and this comes up every so often.

netplan - the default network configuration tool in Ubuntu 17.10 onwards - currently supports WPA2 Personal networks, and open (unencrypted) networks only. If you need something else, consider using NetworkManager directly, or falling back to ifupdown and wpa_supplicant for a little longer.

Without further ado, here are tested, working YAML files for connection to my local WPA2 and unencrypted network. The only things that have been changed are the SSIDs and password. Both networks have a router providing dhcp4. In both cases I assume there's only one wifi device in the system - if this is not true, replace match: {} with something more specific.

You can drop these in /etc/netplan and run netplan generate; netplan apply and things should work. The network will also be brought up on subsequent boots.

Note that, as always in YAML, indentation matters.

WPA2 Personal

network:
    version: 2
    wifis:
        wlan0:
             renderer: NetworkManager
             match: {}
             dhcp4: true
             access-points:
                 "wpa2 network":
                     password: "Our passphrase for our network"

Open network

network:
    version: 2
    wifis:
        wlan0:
             renderer: NetworkManager
             match: {}
             dhcp4: true
             access-points:
                 "open network": {}

Hopefully that is helpful. As mentioned, #netplan on freenode is a good place to get netplan help, and you can file bugs on Launchpad.