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)

Passing information into your module

So far, we have only dealt with a module that received no input from the user at all. One strength of Ansible is how easy a playbook makes it to structure the inputs that you want to pass from a module, as well as passing the output of one module back into the input of another. In this recipe, we are going to see how to both implement and document the arguments that are being passed into our module.

Getting ready

Verify that Ansible is installed by opening up your terminal and running ansible --version, and also verify that you have included the local directory in which you are storing all your modules to the Ansible path by adding it to the ANSIBLE_LIBRARY environment variable. You can find information on how to do this in the Setting up the module structure recipe.

In that directory, create a new file called value_module.py that is going to contain our module code.

How to do it…

Follow these steps to create a new Ansible...