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)

Handling commands that prompt for information using netmiko

In the previous recipes in this chapter, we have always run commands that did not expect any user input. Once issued to the device, we could just wait for them to finish and see the output returned by netmiko. But what about commands that do prompt for confirmation? A typical example would be a delete command that can be used to delete a file from the device. This command will prompt for confirmation.

A naïve implementation could be to issue our delete command, wait a few moments to be sure that the device is showing the prompt, and then send the required confirmation, for example a line break or a y using another send_command() call. While this approach would work, it is clumsy and does not take into account changes to the required string. Since this is a common task, netmiko does provide the functionality to react to a command prompting for information.

In this recipe, we will issue a delete command and react...