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)

Exploring the API Explorer

When diving into a new API, it can be quite daunting to explore it. While trying out requests from a Python script can be done, it is usually easier to explore in a graphical user interface (GUI). Many cloud APIs offer this type of interactive documentation where, with a few clicks, you can not only see the schemas of a request, which Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) to use, and which parameters to pass but can also run the request directly from your web browser. FMC offers a similar feature on the device itself, called the API Explorer. Based on the OpenAPI Specification, a standard to define REST APIs, an interactive page for the API can be generated and used to execute API requests from within your browser.

In this recipe, we are going to have a look at the FMC API Explorer and explore its capabilities:

  1. Access your FMC installation's API Explorer by navigating to the following link: https://<path_to_your_fmc_webinterface> /api/api...