Book Image

Python Network Programming Techniques

By : Marcel Neidinger
Book Image

Python Network Programming Techniques

By: Marcel Neidinger

Overview of this book

Network automation offers a powerful new way of changing your infrastructure network. Gone are the days of manually logging on to different devices to type the same configuration commands over and over again. With this book, you'll find out how you can automate your network infrastructure using Python. You'll get started on your network automation journey with a hands-on introduction to the network programming basics to complement your infrastructure knowledge. You'll learn how to tackle different aspects of network automation using Python programming and a variety of open source libraries. In the book, you'll learn everything from templating, testing, and deploying your configuration on a device-by-device basis to using high-level REST APIs to manage your cloud-based infrastructure. Finally, you'll see how to automate network security with Cisco’s Firepower APIs. By the end of this Python network programming book, you'll have not only gained a holistic overview of the different methods to automate the configuration and maintenance of network devices, but also learned how to automate simple to complex networking tasks and overcome common network programming challenges.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Authenticating against the FMC REST API

In this recipe, we'll learn how to obtain an authentication token for our FMC console. In contrast to other REST APIs, such as the Cisco Meraki API we explored in a previous chapter, FMC's REST API does not use a static authentication token that can be generated for a user and is valid indefinitely. Instead, we must use our username/password combination to obtain a token that can then be used for all further requests to authenticate the request. In addition to the token itself, the response also contains a list of available domains that our account has access to.

Since we must do this authentication for every request, we'll write a function that takes our username/password combination as well as the base URL of our console and returns an authenticated requests session object, as well as a list of domains. We will then reuse this function in the coming chapters to create an authenticated session.

Getting ready

Open your...