This package is to help network engineers have a easy interface to parse device config. Currently the goal is to say a function(device stats, configuration, bgp neighbors(although that kinda fits into device stats hhhhmmmm..... ), ping up down(maybe))

goal for project

• Allow users to run commands or run services on their devices.
• Make adding to repo easy.
• User inputs device and services they want to run they get command and parsed output back to them.

Important for me

• Create tests for code

Why am I doing this?

• To help me learn programming better.
• Because creating a pyats parsers are hard to develop for and hard to add features
• Selfishly I want to have a repo that is known out in the community but one that also benefits me
• Not all data parsing is cli sometimes its controller based. and I want to be able to get data back from both controller based network devices and cli devices

Components

• Nornir
  • Needed to help create my workflow
  • also help with creating inventory
• TextFSM
  • This is to take a TextFSM template and a CLI command and give back structured data
• ntc-templates
  • This is a library of textfsm templates
• nornir_netmiko
  • Used as a connection plugin for nornir to use netmiko
  • I decided to use this plugin because many many tools that are used in network automation uses netmiko under the hood.
  • Netmiko was developed based off paramiko and designed for network devices.
• Poetry
  • I wanted to try it out and help maintain my environment

Standards

• .yaml is my yaml file extension

• maybe have the inventory be a configuration file. Maybe that would be easier to use.

• Set up environment
  • set up github repo
  • install poetry
  • poetry init new-python-package-name
  • poetry add python-packages
• Create nornir config file
• Create nornir inventory for first testing
• play around with nornir a bit and see if my config file works and my inventory works.
• create script file to play around with.
• figure out how to run script with poetry
  • poetry shell to get into venv
  • poetry run python network-config-parser/init_script.py
  • I did have to fix my folder structure in order to make sure I grabbed the correct files.
• found out that my poetry is running python 3.8 but i want to use 3.12. now i need to figure out how to update my python in my poetry
• run poetry config --list to find what your poetry is configured to use.
• took me a while but here is what worked
  • update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/python python /usr/bin/python3.12 1
  • This set python3.12 as my system default
  • I had a lot A LOT of issues here.
  • What worked for me was to uninstall python 3.8
  • run these commands
    • update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/python python /usr/bin/python3.12 1
    • update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/python python3 /usr/bin/python3.12 1
    • curl -O https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
    • python get-pip.py
    • finally after all that poety was working with python 3.12
• also forgot to enable autocompletion in bash to i added that.
  • poetry completions bash >> ~/.bash_completion
• as I am trying to figure out how to use nornir_netmiko, I look at the nornir_netmiko github repo a lot to see how the project is laid out. one example is figuring out how to import the task I want to use quickly. I see that the task I want to use i in nornir_netmiko then in tasks finally I see the module I care about.
• I took a look at the multicommand task, but that appears to be more for configuration where you might get prompted to run a command, type y on your keyboard then you need to hit enter on your keyboard for confirm. another example would be configuring a interface. and first you say the interface, then you enter the interface command mode and update the ip address or the description.
• Long story short that command doesnt work for what I want to do.
• instead of printing out a bunch of statements trying to get the data you need its better to use the vscode debug. that gives you a nice gui to look through the data and find what you need.
• Next I decided to test out how ntc and textfsm work together.
• started by creating a new module.
• I found a example on the ntc-template docs I was able to use that.
• Init commit of project inbound. This is more or less a working solution basic solution for what I want.
• I went down a rabbit hole about OOP a little bit. I understand teh concepts of oop and abstract base classes. But when to use those exact concepts at not as clear to me.
• I was listening to a audio book on a long drive the other day and the audio book said to use OOP When I want to hide the implementation details or when I need to group a large number of tasks together. I think that will become clear to me as I embark down this program.
• I created my first basic task. then I created a little bit more complex task.
• Next I need to figure out how to get the output from the first task and enter it into the second task.

first nornir task def command_to_parse(task: Task, command: str): return Result( host=task.host, result= f" command to run {command}" )

converted into

def command_to_parse(task: Task, user_command: str, data: str = None): data = '*22:58:52.913 UTC Sat Jul 6 2024' version_parsed = parse_output(platform=task.host.platform, command=user_command, data=data) return_result = Result(host=task.host, result = version_parsed) return return_result