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)

Technical requirements

For this chapter and the remainder of the book, you'll require an installation of Python. Specifically, you'll need a Python interpreter of version 3.6.1 or higher. This book makes use of the language constructs of Python 3 and, therefore, is incompatible with Python 2.x. Please also install the napalm package (that is, python3 -m pip install napalm). At the time of writing, we are using the latest version of napalm, which is version 3.2.0. You can install this exact version by issuing python3 -m pip install ncclient==3.2.0. All of the code examples have been developed and tested on a Mac OS X machine that is running Mac OS X version 10.15.4.

You will also need a code editor. Some popular choices include Microsoft Visual Studio Code or Notepad++. Additionally, you'll need a device (either virtual or physical) that you can log in to via SSH.

You can view this chapter's code in action here: https://bit.ly/3iLeyU1