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 and applying a configuration template with Jinja2 and netmiko

With the recipes so far, we have only read back information from our network devices. What we have not done so far is apply a new configuration to our device.

In Chapter 3, Building Configuration Templates Using Jinja2, we saw how we can use the Jinja2 templating language to build a new configuration file based on an existing template. In this recipe, we are going to combine Jinja2's ability to render a configuration template into an actual configuration file and netmiko's ability to apply a file as a new configuration to a network device to go from a configuration template to a configuration that is applied to a real device.

Getting ready

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

Additionally, we'll need a Jinja2 template, so in the same directory as...