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)

Documenting your module

One great feature of Ansible is its built-in documentation. Similar to man pages on a Unix system, we can use the ansible-doc command to get a summary of the module's functionality, which arguments it accepts, which values can be expected to be returned, as well as examples on how to use the module in your playbooks.

However, if we run the ansible-doc command on the module created in the Setting up the module structure recipe, you'll be left with an error message stating that the module is missing documentation:

Figure 10.2 – Exemplar error when trying to access the documentation of an undocumented module

Figure 10.2 – Exemplar error when trying to access the documentation of an undocumented module

Ansible does not require us to provide any additional files to serve as the documentation that is retrieved and presented to the user by the ansible-doc command. Rather, we embed the documentation into the Ansible module itself, and this is exactly what we are going to do in this recipe.

Getting ready

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