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)

Authenticating web requests

In this chapter, we will learn how APIs handle authentication when they're queried. While there are some APIs out there that do not require any sort of authentication, most APIs will require some sort of user-provided authentication in order to associate a request with a user and verify that that user is actually who they claim to be. This also helps ensure they have the right set of permissions to access the resource that is being requested.

The most common way to carry out this authentication is by using an Authorization header. You may want to refer to Chapter 8, Configuring Devices Using RESTCONF and requests, the Revisiting the HTTPS request-response module recipe, for a more detailed recap of how HTTP requests work, but in summary, headers are additional meta information that can be sent by a client to the server. The header is a key-value pair, where in our example the key is Authorization and the value is the secret that authenticates us...