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 a pyATS testbed file

When connecting to devices, we always need a way of specifying the connection details. In previous chapters, we have provided these details either in the script or asked the user to provide the connection details upon execution. With pyATS, there is a different concept. pyATS relies on a text file, written in YAML Ain't Markup Language (YAML) and commonly referred to as a testbed, that specifies the different attributes such as device type, hostname, and username/password for our device.

In this recipe, you'll see how to create such a testbed file and how to use the interactive shell that comes with every installation of pyATS to test the connectivity to the devices in your testbed.

Getting ready

Open your code editor and start by creating a file called testbed.yaml. Next, navigate in your terminal to the same directory in which you just created the testbed.yaml file.

How to do it…

Follow these steps to define a testbed...