Book Image

Mastering Python Networking - Second Edition

By : Eric Chou
Book Image

Mastering Python Networking - Second Edition

By: Eric Chou

Overview of this book

Networks in your infrastructure set the foundation for how your application can be deployed, maintained, and serviced. Python is the ideal language for network engineers to explore tools that were previously available to systems engineers and application developers. In this second edition of Mastering Python Networking, you’ll embark on a Python-based journey to transition from traditional network engineers to network developers ready for the next-generation of networks. This book begins by reviewing the basics of Python and teaches you how Python can interact with both legacy and API-enabled network devices. As you make your way through the chapters, you will then learn to leverage high-level Python packages and frameworks to perform network engineering tasks for automation, monitoring, management, and enhanced security. In the concluding chapters, you will use Jenkins for continuous network integration as well as testing tools to verify your network. By the end of this book, you will be able to perform all networking tasks with ease using Python.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Network dynamic operations

Our API can now provide static information about the network; anything that we can store in the database can be returned to the requester. It would be great if we can interact with our network directly, such as a query for the device information or to push configuration changes to the device.

We will start this process by leveraging the script we have already seen in Chapter 2, Low-Level Network Device Interactions, for interacting with a device via Pexpect. We will modify the script slightly into a function we can repeatedly use in chapter9_pexpect_1.py:

# We need to install pexpect for our virtual env
$ pip install pexpect

$ cat chapter9_pexpect_1.py
import pexpect

def show_version(device, prompt, ip, username, password):
device_prompt = prompt
child = pexpect.spawn('telnet ' + ip)
child.expect('Username:')
child.sendline...