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)

Issuing commands to a device using NAPALM

With our connection to the device established, we can go ahead and issue a command and retrieve the output of the said command as text. This is similar to what we have previously done, first with paramiko in Chapter 2, Connecting to Network Devices via SSH Using Paramiko, and second with netmiko in Chapter 4, Configuring Network Devices Using Netmiko. NAPALM offers a very convenient method to specify multiple commands at once and retrieve all the output in one dictionary in a nicely organized way. If your device does have a driver for NAPALM available, then this is, by far, the most convenient method to retrieve the output out of paramiko, netmiko, and NAPALM.

Getting ready

Open your code editor and create a file called send_command.py. Next, in your Terminal, navigate to the same directory that you just created the send_command.py file in.

How to do it…

We will use the following steps to establish a connection to our network...