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)

Using NETCONF and ncclient to change the starting configuration

Retrieving the running configuration, as we will learn in the following recipes (please refer to the Changing an interface configuration using NETCONF and ncclient recipe), is already a powerful thing to do. But what if we want to overwrite a configuration? Perhaps we want to provide a completely new configuration from a local file or overwrite the starting configuration with our currently running configuration. This is what we are going to explore in this recipe. We'll learn how to use the copy_config() function from ncclient to copy the currently running configuration to a file and then copy it over to the starting configuration.

Getting ready

Open your code editor and create a file called change_starting.py. Next, in your Terminal, navigate to the same directory that you just created the change_starting.py file in.

You'll also need the login information of a networking device that supports the NETCONF...