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)

Chapter 3: Building Configuration Templates Using Jinja2

Configurations are the lifeblood of networking devices and could be, to draw a relation to software engineering, regarded as the source code of a network. When writing such configuration files, it can be handy to build templates that parts can be reused from. In this chapter, we will see how we can programmatically build and render such templates using a templating language called Jinja2.

The applications of this are manifold. Think of a script that reaches out to your IP Address Management (IPAM) system and automatically builds a configuration based on the information and the template you have written. Using sub-templates, you can significantly improve the overall cohesiveness of your configurations. Instead of each network engineer writing their own take on some type of configuration, you can pull in a template that does exactly this configuration for you.

While we could build our configuration templates with pure Python...