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)

Backing up your device configuration using NAPALM

With our vendor-agnostic functions, we can also carry out common backup tasks with ease. For instance, let's assume, before a big change, you want to back up all the configurations on your devices. NAPALM offers a very convenient way of retrieving not only the running configuration but also the starting and candidate configurations of your devices. In this recipe, we are going to explore how to use this ability to easily retrieve full configurations from a device to create backups.

Getting ready

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

How to do it…

The following steps demonstrate how to connect to a device, read the different types of configurations, and then write them to a file:

  1. Import the napalm module:
    import napalm
  2. From the napalm module, retrieve the appropriate...