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)

Comparing your device's current state to a previously learned state

In the Retrieving your device's current state using pyATS recipe, we learned how to retrieve the state of a device, and in the previous recipe, Using Genie Conf objects to create a portable configuration script, we have seen how to apply changes to our device. This means that we can now not only save the state of a device but also change it. This recipe will cover the final piece of the puzzle and show how to compare our current device state to a previously saved state and print out the difference in the configuration.

Getting ready

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

You'll also need to first create a snapshot of your device's features (see the Retrieving your device's current state using pyATS recipe) before...