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)

Connecting to multiple devices

So far, we have always only dealt with a single device and our connection info was always specified directly in the Python script. It is quite a common use case though to issue the same set of commands or the same configuration to an entire fleet of devices.

Using a script to apply the same command automatically instead of logging into each device manually not only saves time but also prevents configuration drift since all devices are guaranteed to be issued the exact same commands.

In this recipe, we are going to specify the connection information for our devices in the form of a JSON file. Based on the connection information stored in this JSON file we'll then connect to each of these devices, issue a command (show running-config in this example), retrieve the output, and save it to a file.

Getting ready

Open your code editor and start by creating a file called connect_multiple.py. Next, navigate your terminal to the same directory...