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)

Looping over lists in Python

A common use case when programming is the need to apply the same kind of operation to a list of variables. Think, for example, of a script that needs to connect to a few routers. For this to work, the script will need to know the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of said routers and then perform the same set of commands on them. Instead of copying and pasting the same code multiple times and just changing the router IP, we can create a list of our IPs and then execute the commands.

In this recipe, you will see how to create a list of IP addresses and print them out using a for loop. We will reuse the same concept in the next chapter to actually connect to the device and issue configuration commands.

Getting ready

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

How to do it…

In this recipe, we will create IP version 4...