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)

Creating a port configuration template using if-clauses in Jinja2

With for-loops in our templates, we have the ability to, given a list of variables, print a modified version of the same configuration block without having to copy-paste the content.

But what if, depending on the value of the variable, we want to specify different commands? We could, as in the preceding example, use multiple lists but we can also use if-clauses within our template to specify any additional commands necessary in our configuration.

In this example, we are going to create a port configuration. We will specify both access and trunk ports and we will add additional commands to our trunk ports by changing the native VLAN for 802.1Q tagging.

All our ports will be described by dictionaries in our Python script.

Getting ready

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