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)

Gathering facts about your network device using NAPALM

When dealing with a device, we are usually doing two different types of operations. For example, we are either setting information or we are gathering information. NAPALM offers us two different types of functions to carry out these types of actions. To set information, we have configuration functions, and to retrieve information, we have getter functions. We will explore configuration functions in the Creating and applying a configuration template with jinja2 and NAPALM recipe. We have already seen a getter, the get_config() function, in action in the Backing up your device configuration using NAPALM recipe. In this recipe, we will explore more of these functions so that we can retrieve more facts about the device we are connected to.

Getting ready

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

How...