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)

Making HTTP requests using the requests module in Python

As we have seen, the HTTP protocol is a plain text protocol, and while we could implement this protocol by hand, that is very cumbersome. We will thus use the requests module. This module abstracts the process of requesting and handling the response from an HTTP server. In this first recipe, we will see how to do an initial request against a network device that has RESTCONF enabled. This recipe thus also serves as a verification that RESTCONF is properly enabled on your device.

Getting ready

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

How to do it…

Follow these steps to make your first HTTP request using Python and the requests module:

  1. Import the requests module:
    import requests
  2. Create a requests session:
    s = requests.Session()
  3. Specify the connection information...