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)

Packaging and calling your modules from Ansible playbooks

In the recipes so far, we have always used the Ansible command-line tool to directly invoke a module. While this is great for debugging and testing during our development cycle, the goal of Ansible modules is usually to be part of an Ansible playbook. So, how can we use our newly created Ansible modules from a playbook?

In this recipe, we will create a simple playbook as well as the folder structure necessary to call the web_module module that we built in the Using Ansible's built-in functionality to do web requests recipe. The playbook will call our self-written module and then use an Ansible debug task to print out the name of all our organizations that we have access to.

Getting ready

Verify that Ansible is installed by opening up your terminal and running ansible --version. You will need a version of our previously written web_module.py file. You can obtain this by either following the instructions in the...