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)

Retrieving command outputs as structured Python data using netmiko and Genie

In the previous recipe (Sending commands using netmiko), we saw how to send a command and retrieve the output of said command as a string.

While the text output might be perfectly suitable for a human to look at, and understand the different parts, computers have a hard time understanding plaintext.

What if, for example, we want to build a script that prints out all the different interfaces that are available on our networking device? With plaintext, this is going to involve a lot of text manipulation. Since turning the output of CLI commands into structured data is a cornerstone of network automation, libraries have been developed to address this exact issue.

One such library is Genie. Genie (together with pyATS) is an open source project originally developed and currently maintained by Cisco. While it has its roots as an internal Cisco library, it supports the devices from other vendors through...