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)

Controlling the flow of a Python program using if statements

So far, we have only written scripts that ran each of the instructions linearly one after another. But quite often, we want to change the behavior of our script based on the value of a variable. Let's say, for example, that we want to write a script that asks the user what kind of device—a user device or an infrastructure device—they want to configure. Our script then returns an IP address with a pre-defined network part and a user-defined host part.

In this recipe, you will see how to create such a basic IP address management tool if clause.

Getting ready

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

How to do it…

In this recipe, we will create a list of user and infrastructure devices, check what kind of device the user wants to retrieve, and then...