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)

Retrieving all interfaces of a device using RESTCONF and requests

A sort of hello world-type script and a workflow we have seen with different tools throughout this book is the ability to retrieve a list of interfaces currently configured on the device. This can also be achieved using RESTCONF, and in this recipe, we will see how to use the YANG modules that specify our interfaces to retrieve the configuration data present on our device.

Getting ready

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

How to do it…

Follow these steps to retrieve the interfaces from your RESTCONF-enabled network device:

  1. Import the required modules and set up a requests session that can interact with the device. We will also import the prettyprint standard library to get a nicely formatted output later. For a detailed step-by-step...