NORNIR-APPS

Pluggable Network CLI tool built on top of Nornir and Napalm

Why do I need this?

nornir_apps is a lightweight wrapper around Nornir and Napalm and it provides a CLI that makes it easy to plugin Nornir-based scripts you have. The ClI tool comes with a few plugins that use the nornir_napalm tools that may already be suitable for quick tasks. However, you can easily add to the CLI by writing your own plugin.

Getting Started

Installation

Install nornir_apps using pip:

pip install nornir-apps

Configure your Nornir inventory and Initialization config

You can use your existing nornir configuration files and inventory without any modifications. By default, nornir_apps looks for a config.yaml file in the root of directory from which you're using the nornir-app CLI command. You can pass another file using the -i or --init-file flag as well. You can review sample configuration and inventory files below. They are samples from the examples directory in the root of this repo.

# examples/inventory/hosts.yaml
cat9k:
  hostname: 10.253.175.87
  port: 22
  username: cisco
  password: cisco
  groups:
    - cisco_iosxe

# examples/inventory/groups.yaml
---
cisco_iosxe:
  platform: ios
  data:
    role: router
  connection_options:
    napalm:
      extras:
        optional_args:
          fast_cli: False
          secret: cisco
          conn_timeout: 30

---
core:
  raise_on_error: False

runner:
  plugin: threaded
  options:
    num_workers: 100

logging:
  enabled: True

inventory:
  plugin: SimpleInventory
  options:
    host_file: "inventory/hosts.yaml"
    group_file: "inventory/groups.yaml"
    defaults_file: "inventory/defaults.yaml"

Getting Started with the CLI

View available commands

Use nornir_apps --help to view the included commands based on the napalm_nornir project. Any plugin that you create and register will show as an available command in the future.

➜ nornir_app --help

<OUPUT OMMITTED>

Commands:
  napalm-configure  Retrieve device configuration
  napalm-get        Retrieve device configuration using napalm getters
  napalm-ping       Ping device
  napalm-validate   Validate device compliance using napalm_validate

Examples

nornir_app -i inventory/config.yaml -h cat9k napalm-ping -d 8.8.8.8

Note: the CLI looks for a config.yaml file by default to initiliaze Nornir

If you have a config.yaml file present in the current directory, you can omit the -i flag:

nornir_app -h cat9k napalm-ping -d 8.8.8.8

The -h or --host-filter option allows you to pass a simple filter to the inventory for host selection.

nornir_app -h platform=ios,role=router napalm-ping -d 8.8.8.8