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 your device and issuing commands using pyATS

A basic functionality we have seen across all the different packages covered so far is the ability to issue commands against a device. In the Retrieving command outputs as structured Python data using Netmiko and Genie recipe in Chapter 4, Configuring Network Devices Using Netmiko, we have already seen that we can use Genie, the package that is part of the pyATS ecosystem, to retrieve the output of a command not as text but as structured Python data.

In this recipe, we are going to use pyATS to connect to a device, issue a command, and retrieve the output as structured data.

Getting ready

Open your code editor and start by creating a file called testbed.yaml, as well as a file called connect.py. Next, navigate in your terminal to the same directory in which you just created the testbed.yaml file.

How to do it…

Follow these steps to connect to a device and issue a command using pyATS:

  1. Open your...