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)

Writing your rendered template to a file

So far, we have always printed our template back to the user via the command line, and while this can be nice to debug and check whether our script ran correctly, in most cases, we want to save our rendered template as a configuration file to our filesystem.

In this recipe, we will see how we can write the same template we rendered in the Passing variables from Python to the template recipe to our filesystem using Jinja2 template streams.

Getting ready

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

Next, in the same directory as your Python file, create a directory called templates if it does not already exist from a previous recipe. Inside of this directory, create a file called vars.conf.tpl if it does not already exist from a previous recipe.

How to do it

Let's start by writing our Python...