Book Image

Practical Network Automation

By : Abhishek Ratan
Book Image

Practical Network Automation

By: Abhishek Ratan

Overview of this book

Network automation is the use of IT controls to supervise and carry out every-day network management functions. It plays a key role in network virtualization technologies and network functions. The book starts by providing an introduction to network automation, SDN, and its applications, which include integrating DevOps tools to automate the network efficiently. It then guides you through different network automation tasks and covers various data digging and reporting methodologies such as IPv6 migration, DC relocations, and interface parsing, all the while retaining security and improving data center robustness. The book then moves on to the use of Python and the management of SSH keys for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, all followed by practical use cases. The book also covers the importance of Ansible for network automation including best practices in automation, ways to test automated networks using different tools, and other important techniques. By the end of the book, you will be well acquainted with the various aspects of network automation.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Creating web-specific scripts


Now that we have a running environment that's ready to run our scripts, let's create a very basic script to take a look at how it works:

print('Content-Type: text/plain')
print('')
print('Hello, world!')

On IDLE, we type the preceding code and save it as a Python file (such as testscript.py). Now, as we discussed earlier, for our web reference we mapped a physical directory or location in IIS. The newly created testscript.py needs to be in that folder to be accessible from the web.

The output of the web based URL call for Python script is as follows:

  • As we can see in the preceding screenshot, the script is now called from the browser using the localhost URL. The output is a simple Hello, world ! that was called to be printed in script code.
  • Additionally, the value Content-Type: text/plain specifies that the return values from Python will be simple text that the browser will interpret as plain text rather than HTML.

Now let's look at an example of modifying it to HTML...