Book Image

Hands-On Enterprise Automation with Python

By : Bassem Aly
Book Image

Hands-On Enterprise Automation with Python

By: Bassem Aly

Overview of this book

Hands-On Enterprise Automation with Python starts by covering the set up of a Python environment to perform automation tasks, as well as the modules, libraries, and tools you will be using. We’ll explore examples of network automation tasks using simple Python programs and Ansible. Next, we will walk you through automating administration tasks with Python Fabric, where you will learn to perform server configuration and administration, along with system administration tasks such as user management, database management, and process management. As you progress through this book, you’ll automate several testing services with Python scripts and perform automation tasks on virtual machines and cloud infrastructure with Python. In the concluding chapters, you will cover Python-based offensive security tools and learn how to automate your security tasks. By the end of this book, you will have mastered the skills of automating several system administration tasks with Python.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

What is Fabric?

Fabric (http://www.fabfile.org/) is a high-level Python library that is used to connect to remote servers (through the paramiko library) and execute predefined tasks on them. It runs a tool called fab on the machine that hosts the fabric module. This tool will look for a fabfile.py file, located in the same directory that you run the tool in. The fabfile.py file contains your tasks, defined as a Python function that is called from the command line to start the execution on the servers. The Fabric tasks themselves are just normal Python functions, but they contain special methods that are used to execute commands on remote servers. Also, at the beginning of fabfile.py, you need to define some environmental variables, such as the remote hosts, username, password, and any other variables needed during execution:

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