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)

Gathering facts using netmiko

In the previous recipe (Retrieving command outputs as structured Python data using netmiko and Genie), we saw how to retrieve the output of a command as structured data in Python. In this recipe, we will build upon this functionality to get a profile of all our interfaces. This will show you how to use the parsed data to quickly print out and identify the relevant information.

For this example, we'll be using the show interfaces command again and, for each interface, we will retrieve and print out the following:

  • The interface name
  • The status of the interface (enabled or not enabled)
  • The physical address of the interface
  • The duplex mode
  • Any counters that are above 0

Getting ready

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

When installing netmiko via pip, it does not come preinstalled...