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 variables from Python to a template

So far, we have only seen a static template and we have not passed any information from our Python script back into the template.

The power of this concept, however, is that we can pass information that we have obtained in our Python script, for example, by querying an API or by parsing the output of an SSH command we issued on a device, and use that information in our template.

Luckily, Jinja2 supports an easy mechanism for passing variables from our script into our template, so in this recipe, we will see how we can do this.

Getting ready

Open your code editor and start by creating a file called vars.py. Next, navigate your terminal to the same directory that you just created the vars.py file in.

In the same directory as your Python file, create a directory called templates if you have not already done so in a previous recipe. Inside of this directory, create a file called vars.conf.tpl.

How to do it...

Let&apos...