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)

Creating and applying a configuration template with jinja2 and NAPALM

A very powerful concept of NetDevOps is configuration templates. The idea is to have all your device's configurations as a template and then render out that template with some specific data for your device. This brings you one step closer to the idea of having your infrastructure stored as code. In this recipe, we will use the jinja2 templating language to create a configuration template that we can then apply to our device using NAPALM. Please refer to Chapter 3, Building Configuration Templates Using Jinja2, for a complete introduction to the jinja2 module and the jinja2 templating language. In this recipe, we are going to replicate the configuration template that we created in the Configuring an access list using for loops in jinja2 recipe of Chapter 3, Building Configuration Templates Using Jinja2.

Getting ready

Open your code editor and create a file called apply_template.py. Next, in your Terminal...