nornir-scrapli 2020.9.16.post1

scrapli Nornir plugin

nornir_scrapli

nornir_scrapli -- scrapli's plugin for nornir.

Feel free to join the very awesome networktocode slack workspace here, where you will find a scrapli channel where you can discuss anything about scrapli, as well as tons of other channels covering all sorts of network/network-automation topics!

Table of Contents

• Quick Start Guide
  • Installation
  • A Simple Example
• Supported Platforms
• Documentation
• General Information

Quick Start Guide

Installation

In most cases installation via pip is the simplest and best way to install nornir_scrapli.

pip install nornir-scrapli

A Simple Example

Example config file:

---
inventory:
  plugin: YAMLInventory
  options:
    host_file: "nornir_data/hosts.yaml"
    group_file: "nornir_data/groups.yaml"
    defaults_file: "nornir_data/defaults.yaml"

Example inventory file (host/group/default, see "real" Nornir docs for lots more info!):

---
iosxe-1:
  hostname: 172.18.0.11
  connection_options:
    scrapli:
      platform: cisco_iosxe
      port: 22
      extras:
        ssh_config_file: True
        auth_strict_key: False

from nornir import InitNornir
from nornir_scrapli.tasks import (
    get_prompt,
    send_command,
    send_configs
)

nr = InitNornir(config_file="nornir_data/config.yaml")

prompt_results = nr.run(task=get_prompt)
command_results = nr.run(task=send_command, command="show version")
config_results = nr.run(
    task=send_configs,
    configs=["interface loopback123", "description nornir_scrapli was here"],
)

print("get_prompt result:")
print(prompt_results["iosxe-1"].result)
print("send_command result:")
print(prompt_results["iosxe-1"].result)
print("send_configs result:")
print(config_results["iosxe-1"].result)

$ python my_scrapli_script.py
get_prompt result:
3560CX#
send_command result:
Cisco IOS Software, C3560CX Software (C3560CX-UNIVERSALK9-M), Version 15.2(4)E7, RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc2)
<SNIP>
send_configs result:

Supported Platforms

nornir_scrapli supports the "core" scrapli drivers, as well as the GenericDriver. See [scrapli docs](https://github.com /carlmontanari/scrapli#supported-platforms) for more info. The platform argument in the inventory data should use the "normal" NAPALM style platform names or generic. In the hopefully near term this will be improved further to support scrapli_community platforms as well.

Example platform values (for inventory data):

platform: cisco_iosxe
platform: cisco_iosxr
platform: cisco_nxos
platform: arista_eos
platform: juniper_junos
platform: generic

Documentation

Documentation is auto-generated using pdoc3. Documentation is linted (see Linting and Testing section) via pydocstyle.

Documentation is hosted via GitHub Pages and can be found here. You can also view this readme as a web page here.

To regenerate documentation locally, use the following make command:

make docs

General Information

Nornir has historically contained it's plugins within the actual Nornir codebase itself, this however has changed! As of mid September 2020, Nornir 3.0.0 has been officially released -- this move to the 3.x.x version now expects plugins to be external to the code base. If you are looking for pre 3.x.x support, please use the 2020.09.01 version.

If you have used Nornir before (pre 3.x.x), this package should be very similar to what you already know. Since the plugins used to live in Nornir you could simply import them from the appropriate package as such:

from nornir.plugins.tasks.networking import netconf_get_config

With nornir_scrapli you simply install this package along side "regular" Nornir, and import the tasks from nornir_scrapli directly:

from nornir_scrapli.tasks import send_command

As soon as a nornir_scrapli task is imported, it (nornir_scrapli) will register as a connection, and things should work as normal from there!

The last important difference with nornir_scrapli is that in addition to the "normal" data in the Nornir Result object, nornir_scrapli also assigns the scrapli Response object (or list of Response objects) to the scrapli_response attribute. This means that you can access all of the "normal" scrapli response data from this object -- including things like elapsed_time and textfsm_parse_output:

>>> some_nornir_result["sea-ios-1"].scrapli_response.elapsed_time
0.039469
>>> some_nornir_result["sea-ios-1"].scrapli_response.textfsm_parse_output()
[[some structured data back from the device!]]

If you would like to continue using print_result like "normal" in nornir, but would like to see structured data (if available) in the print_result output, you can use the nornir_scrapli print_structured_result function. This function can be imported from the scrapli functions module:

from nornir_scrapli.functions import print_structured_result

This function acts pretty much exactly like the "normal" print result function, but will of course try to print the structured result. By default this will try to use textfsm to parse results, but it is of course configurable via the parser keyword argument. As scrapli will return an empty data structure if parsing fails, this may cause tasks to look like they are getting skipped in the output (nornir's print result function does not print empty lists), if you would like to fall back to printing the unparsed output you can do so by setting the fail_to_string keyword argument to True as follows:

print_structured_result(my_agg_result, parser="genie", fail_to_string=True)