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)

Installing modules from the PyPI

While the Python standard library provides an extensive set of functionalities, more specific use cases—such as connecting to a networking device to issue configuration commands—are not covered specifically. While we could implement them using the functionality provided in the standard library, this work has already been done by the community that contributed packages back into the Python ecosystem, more specifically by making them available for you to install from PyPI. Each chapter of this book will cover one such package that is specific for network automation.

In this recipe, we will use the pip package manager (which is a recursive acronym for pip installs packages) to install the paramiko package we will use in the next chapter.

When installing packages from PyPI, we are installing third-party modules. Contrary to the modules that come with the standard library, these third-party modules need to be downloaded from the internet...