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)

Using Ansible's built-in functionality to do web requests

In previous chapters, we have seen how to use modules from the Python standard library within our Ansible module. But what about third-party packages such as the requests package we used in Chapter 8, Configuring Devices Using RESTCONF and requests, and Chapter 9, Consuming Controllers and High-Level Networking APIs with requests, to make web requests? While we could import an external package, Ansible modules generally try to be as independent of third-party packages as possible. But this does not mean that we have to rebuild the entire functionality to make HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests from scratch. Ansible comes pre-packaged with many built-in utility modules, one of which, the uri module, can be used to make web requests.

In this recipe, we will see how you can use an Ansible module and built-in functionality to send an HTTP request to the Meraki application programming interface (API). We'll...