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)

Connecting to devices from different vendors using NAPALM

Let's start by learning how to connect to devices from different vendors using NAPALM. In Chapter 4, Configuring Network Devices Using Netmiko, we saw the idea of passing the type of device to the library so that the background code of our library can behave differently. NAPALM takes this concept to the next level and uses drivers to abstract the different vendors and provide a common interface.

Getting ready

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

How to do it…

We will use the following steps to establish a connection to our network device using NAPALM:

  1. Import the napalm module:
    import napalm
  2. From the napalm module, retrieve the appropriate driver for your device's vendor. Please refer to the How it works… section for a list of possible drivers:
    driver...