Device Programmability

ReneMolenaar · December 2, 2019, 11:45am

Hi Hany,

Netmiko is a library to interact with network devices through SSH. You can use it to automate things that you would normally do yourself with SSH.

Postman is (simply said) an API client. If you want to interact with your router through postman, you’ll have to use something that both postman and the router support (like RESTCONF).

If you want to use Python with RESTCONF, you can use the requests library.

Cisco DevNet has some examples. Here’s one to get the hostname of a router:

github.com

CiscoDevNet/restconf-examples/blob/master/restconf-102/get_hostname.py

#!/usr/bin/python

# import the requests library
import requests
import sys

# disable warnings from SSL/TLS certificates
requests.packages.urllib3.disable_warnings()

# use the IP address or hostname of your CSR1000V
HOST = 'ios-xe-mgmt.cisco.com'
# use the HTTPS port for RESTCONF on your CSR1000V
PORT = 9443
# use your user credentials to access the CSR1000V
USER = 'root'
PASS = 'C!sc0123'


# create a main() method
def main():

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Here’s one to create a static route:

github.com

CiscoDevNet/restconf-examples/blob/master/restconf-102/create_static.py

#!/usr/bin/python
#
# Create a static route on CSR1000V
# given parameters in code as global vars
# and route / nexthop or interface names as arguments
#
# darien@sdnessentials.com
#
import argparse
import netaddr
import requests
import sys


HOST = 'ios-xe-mgmt.cisco.com'
PORT = 9443
USER = 'root'
PASS = 'C!sc0123'
BASE = 'GigabitEthernet3'

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This works, but building python scripts with the requests library like this can be a pain. I looked, but there aren’t any good RESTCONF python libraries. NETCONF is probably easier, because of the excellent ncclient library.

Rene