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 modular templates using Jinja2's import methods

So far, our configuration templates have all been one single file that included all the information. While this is perfectly fine for smaller configurations, it can become hard to maintain a configuration template that is thousands of lines long and spans different aspects of your configuration.

In this recipe, you'll see how to split your configuration template up into multiple sub-templates and include them in one big configuration. This technique allows you to piece your configuration together from building blocks instead of rewriting these blocks (like the configuration of an interface) every time you are creating a new configuration template.

Getting ready

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

Next, in the same directory as your Python file, create a directory...