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)

The subprocess call suite

The subprocess module provides another function that makes process spawning a safer operation than using Popen(). The subprocess call() function waits for the called command/program to finish reading the output. It supports the same arguments as the Popen() constructor, such as shell, executable, and cwd, but this time, your script will wait for the program to complete and populate the return code without the need to communicate().

If you inspect the call() function, you will see that it's actually a wrapper around the Popen() class, but with a wait() function that waits until the end of the command before returning the output:

import subprocess
subprocess.call(["ifconfig", "docker0"], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=None, shell=False)

If you want more protection for your code, you can use the check_call() function. It's the...