Are you looking for a vendor-neutral, scalable, efficient network automation framework, where all tasks are written in Python programming language? If yes, then you are at the right place! And it is Napalm !!!

What is Napalm ?

Why Napalm ?

How does it work?

Setup virtual environment(Optional)

If you would like to isolate the dependencies of scrapli from the system, you can create a python virtual environment.

Install virtualenv package using pip. pip is a package installer for Python. Here I am using Python 3.8.5 version.

pip install virtualenv

Using virtualenv package, create a python virtual environment. Refer creation of python virtual environments.

virtualenv napalm_venv

Now activate the virtual environment.

source ~/napalm_venv/bin/activate

Install Napalm and its plugins

In the “napalm_venv” virtual environment, install napalm. At the moment of producing this tutorial, latest version of napalm is 3.3.1.

pip install napalm

Once you have all the required packages installed, go ahead and write the code to retrieve, configure or validate device data.

Write a few lines of code to automate your network

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

Example 4

Example 5

What are the flavours of Napalm ?

Conclusion

Napalm is a vendor neutral, cross-platform open-source project that provides a unified API to automate the mnagement of network devices. Being an open-sourced project written in python makes it easy for the user to debug and troubleshoot. Above all, it’s time-efficient, free, and easy to use. Write simple lines of python code to execute your network tasks on a lot of your network devices quickly!! Stay tuned to learn about another network automation tool in our next post. Please do comment below, your questions, and what you would like to learn about network automation!!

Resources

• Napalm Documentation
• Napalm GitHub repository