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)

Sending commands using netmiko

Now that we have successfully established a connection to our network device using netmiko and ConnectHandler, we want to be able to send commands to our device. In Paramiko, the process of sending and receiving the output was rather cumbersome. Luckily, netmiko provides an easy-to-use abstraction over Paramiko that lets us issue a command and read back the output with just one line of code.

In this recipe, you will see how to programmatically open an SSH connection by creating an instance of netmiko's ConnectHandler, send a command to the remote device, and retrieve the output of the command as a string.

Getting ready

Open your code editor and start by creating a file called send_command.py. Next, navigate your terminal to the same directory that you just created the send_command.py file in.

How to do it...

Let's start by importing the required classes from the netmiko library. We will then set up a dictionary that contains...