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)

Using Genie Conf objects to create a portable configuration script

So far, we have always used the Genie parser to go from unstructured textual output to structured data in the form of a Python dictionary, but Genie can also do it the other way around! Instead of specifying a configuration command and issuing this command to the network device we can, using pure Python objects, define our changed configuration in the form of Python objects. Genie then goes ahead and, based on the Python objects, generates the required configuration files and issues them to the device. This means that we can write consistent device configurations and let Genie handle the work of converting this into actual configuration instructions.

In this recipe, we are going to configure an interface and generate the required configuration file using pyATS and Genie.

Getting ready

Open your code editor and start by creating a file called testbed.yaml, as well as a file called change.py. Next, navigate...