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 a network device using ncclient

With the introduction to the NETCONF and YANG modules out of the way, we can now discuss how to connect to a network device using Python so that we can later issue a NETCONF command to it. NETCONF is built on top of the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) protocol, and while we could use a generic library that implements this protocol, the ncclient package has been purposely built to be used to connect to network devices using NETCONF and, therefore, issue RPC calls to the device.

In this example, we'll set up our connection details, open a connection, and then retrieve the list of all the YANG modules that are currently supported by the device we are connecting to. Then, we'll filter this list of available YANG modules to identify the OpenConfig modules and print the list of found modules back to the user.

Getting ready

Open your code editor and create a file called connect.py. Next, in your Terminal, navigate to the same directory...