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)

Ansible conditionals

Ansible conditionals are similar to conditional statements in programming languages. In Chapter 1, Review of TCP/IP Protocol Suite and Python, we saw that Python uses conditional statements to only execute a section of the code using if.. then or while statements. In Ansible, it uses conditional keywords to only run a task when the condition is met. In many cases, the execution of a play or task may depend on the value of a fact, variable, or the previous task result. For example, if you have a play to upgrading router images, you want to include a step to make sure the new router image is on the device before you move on to the next play of rebooting the router.

In this section, we will discuss the when clause, which is supported for all modules, as well as unique conditional states that are supported in Ansible networking command modules. Some of the conditions...