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)

Technical requirements

For this chapter and the remainder of this book, you'll need to install Python. Specifically, you'll need a Python interpreter that's version 3.6.1 or higher. This book makes use of the language constructs of Python 3, which means it is incompatible with Python 2.x. Additionally you'll need to install the requests package. You can install the newest version of requests using python3 -m pip install requests. At the time of writing, the current version is version 2.25.1.

If you want to follow the There's more… sections, you'll also need the Meraki SDK. To install the newest version of the package, you can use python3 -m pip install meraki. At the time of writing, the current version is version 1.7.2.

You will also need a code editor. Popular choices include Microsoft Visual Studio Code or Notepad++. Additionally, you'll need a Meraki organization that has API access enabled. You can find a guide on how to do this...