NETCLI

netcli is the CLI for the people who doesn't want to remember every command from every vendor gear.

Networking nowadays is moving away from traditional CLI operation, but there is still some debugging use-cases when a CLI interaction gives some benefits. However, when you spend more time coding than CLIing, you end up forgetting about specific CLI syntax, still necessary when you are managing a multi-vendor fleet.

To ovecome this issue, netcli lets you create your own CLI language, for interact with any device using your own custom commands.

netcli solves this problem using a simple approach:

• You have a config mode to handle your custom commands and the translation for all the specific vendors you are interested in.
• You have a connect mode to run an interactive CLI against your devices and enjoy your commands

Installation

pip install netcli

How to run it

Config

Your customs commands will be stored in ~/.my_netcli_commands.json

Add

$ netcli config add "bgp received routes neighbor:192.0.2.1"

Note:

• Use quotes to add your command
• Arguments should come at the end, using the pattern <arg_name>:<default_value>

This will enter an interactive mode to provide:

• Description: Useful to remember what this command is doing
• Vendor specific implementations, using this format: <vendor_type> - <vendor_command>
  • important within <vendorcommand> you can place the arguments provided using [arg_name]
  • Example: show bgp summary [instance (vrf)]
    • Every argument is between square brackets []
    • Within the brackets, the parenthesis () is the keyword that will be replaced
    • If an argument keyword has the string value "None", the argument (and related text) will be omitted
  • <vendor_type> comes from Netmiko library

Delete

$ netcli config delete "bgp received routes"

Show

$ netcli config show

It listes the custom commands with the description and ports. If you need the vendor implementation, use --verbose

Interactive CLI

$ netcli connect <target> -v <vendor_type>

Enjoy it!

Notes:

• To overwrite a default value use [<arg_name>:<new_value>]
• Execution of raw commands is possible starting the command with r-
• Matching output of custom commands can be achieved by adding | and the string to match
• Use help/h to get extra help

Default options

You can overwrite default behaviours by using file ~/.netcli.cfg to define some custom values to easy your operation:

{
        "dns_suffix": ".opendns.com",
        "global_delay_factor": 6,
        "max_lines": 20
}

Supported values:

• dns_suffix is concatenated at the end of your target name
• max_lines limit the maximum number of lines to be returned to the CLI (this doesn't affect the logs)
• log_path full path to store the logging of the session. By default is the current directory with the timestamp (i.e. netcli_20190303-194937)
• timeout Netmiko timeout
• global_delay_factor Netmiko global_delay_factor