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)

Changing an interface configuration using NETCONF and ncclient

So far, we have learned how to retrieve or change our entire configuration. But what if we only want to modify certain aspects of our device's state? That is what we are going to cover in this recipe. As an example, we will use an OpenConfig YANG module to create a VLAN interface. While the code is specific to this example, in the sense that we are generating XML that can be used to create a VLAN, the workflow itself is always the same:

  1. Generate an XML message that is formatted according to the specifications of the YANG module.
  2. Send the generated XML to your network device using ncclient and the edit_config() method by choosing the running configuration as your target. This is similar to how we used the running configuration as our source in the get_config() call.

Getting ready

Open your code editor and create a file called create_vlan.py. Next, in your Terminal, navigate to the same directory...