scrapli 2020.12.31

Fast, flexible, sync/async, Python 3.6+ screen scraping client specifically for network devices

scrapli

scrapli -- scrap(e c)li -- is a python library focused on connecting to devices, specifically network devices (routers/switches/firewalls/etc.) via SSH or Telnet. The name scrapli -- is just "scrape cli" (as in screen scrape) squished together! scrapli's goal is to be as fast and flexible as possible, while providing a thoroughly tested, well typed, well documented, simple API that supports both synchronous and asynchronous usage.

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
  • More Examples
  • Documentation
  • Wiki
  • Other Stuff
• scrapli: What is it
• Supported Platforms
• Related Scrapli Libraries
• Advanced Installation
• Versioning
• Basic Usage
  • Picking the right Driver
  • Basic Driver Arguments
  • Opening and Closing a Connection
  • Sending Commands
  • Response Object
  • Sending Configurations
  • Textfsm/NTC-Templates Integration
  • Cisco Genie Integration
  • TTP Integration
  • Handling Prompts
  • Telnet
  • SSH Config Support
• Advanced Usage
  • All Driver Arguments
  • Platform Regex
  • On Open
  • On Close
  • Timeouts
  • Keepalives
  • Driver Privilege Levels
  • Using Scrape Directly
  • Using the GenericDriver
  • Using a Different Transport
  • Auth Bypass
  • Transport Options
  • Raise for Status
• FAQ
• Transport Notes, Caveats, and Known Issues
  • Paramiko
  • SSH2-Python
  • System SSH
  • Telnet
• Linting and Testing
  • Linting
  • Testing
• Roadmap

Quick Start Guide

Installation

In most cases installation via pip is the simplest and best way to install scrapli. See below or here for advanced installation details.

pip install scrapli

A Simple Example

from scrapli.driver.core import IOSXEDriver

my_device = {
    "host": "172.18.0.11",
    "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
    "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
    "auth_strict_key": False,
}

conn = IOSXEDriver(**my_device)
conn.open()
response = conn.send_command("show run")
print(response.result)

$ python my_scrapli_script.py
Building configuration...

Current configuration : 7584 bytes
!
! Last configuration change at 19:24:38 PST Sat Feb 29 2020 by carl
! NVRAM config last updated at 19:00:28 PST Fri Feb 7 2020 by carl
!
version 15.2
service nagle
no service pad
service tcp-keepalives-in
service tcp-keepalives-out
service timestamps debug datetime msec
no service password-encryption
!
<SNIP>
!
end

More Examples

• Basic "native" Scrape operations
• Basic "GenericDriver" operations
• Basic "core" Driver operations
• Basic async operations
• Async multiple connections
• Setting up basic logging
• Using SSH Key for authentication
• Using SSH config file
• Parse output with TextFSM/ntc-templates
• Parse output with Genie
• Transport Options
• Configuration Modes - IOSXR Configure Exclusive
• Configuration Modes - EOS Configure Session
• Banners, Macros, and other "weird" Things

Documentation

• API Docs
  • Root
  • Channel
  • Transport
  • Drivers
• This README as a web page
• Public API Status

Documentation is auto-generated using pdoc3, and hosted in GitHub Pages. Docs are linted (see Linting and Testing section) via pydocstyle and darglint.

To regenerate documentation locally, use the following make command:

make docs

Wiki

Extra, generally platform/transport-specific, examples/documentation/information will be stored in the Wiki associated with this repository. You can find it here.

Other Stuff

Other scrapli related docs/blogs/videos/info:

• Scrapli on Dmitry Figol's Network Automation Channel
• Scrapli Intro on Wim Wauter's blog
• Scrapli on the Packet Pushers Heavy Networking Podcast

scrapli: What is it

As stated, scrapli is a python library focused on connecting to devices, specifically network devices via SSH or Telnet.

scrapli is built primarily in three parts: transport, channel, and driver. The transport layer is responsible for providing a file-like interface to the target server. The channel layer is responsible for reading and writing to the provided file-like interface. Finally, the driver provides the user facing API/interface to scrapli.

There are three available "transports" in scrapli "core" -- all of which inherit from a base transport class and provide the same file-like interface to the upstream channel. There are also (currently!) three transport plugins available -- all of which are installable as optional extras. The transport options are:

"Core"

• "system" -- OpenSSH/System available SSH binary
• "telnet" -- Python standard library telnetlib
• "asynctelnet" -- Python standard library asyncio stream

Optional Extra/Plugin

• asyncssh
• ssh2-python
• paramiko

A good question to ask at this point is probably "why?". Why multiple transport options? Why not just use paramiko like most folks do? Historically the reason for moving away from paramiko was simply speed. ssh2-python is a wrapper around the libssh2 C library, and as such is very, very fast. In a prior project (ssh2net), of which scrapli is the successor/evolution, ssh2-python was used with great success, however, it is a bit feature-limited, and development had stalled around the same time scrapli was getting going.

This led to moving back to paramiko, which of course is a fantastic project with tons and tons of feature support . Paramiko, however, does not provide "direct" OpenSSH support (as in -- auto-magically like when you ssh on your normal shell), and I don't believe it provides 100% full OpenSSH support either (ex: ControlPersist). Fully supporting an OpenSSH config file would be an ideal end goal for scrapli, something that may not be possible with Paramiko - ControlPersist in particular is very interesting to me.

With the goal of supporting all of the OpenSSH configuration options the primary transport driver option is simply native system local SSH. The implementation of using system SSH is of course a little bit messy, however scrapli takes care of that for you so you don't need to care about it! The payoff of using system SSH is of course that OpenSSH config files simply "work" -- no passing it to scrapli, no selective support, no need to set username or ports or any of the other config items that may reside in your SSH config file. This driver will likely be the focus of most development for this project, though I will try to keep the other transport drivers -- in particular asyncssh -- as close to parity as is possible/practical.

Adding telnet support via telnetlib was trivial, as the interface is basically the same as SystemSSH, and it turns out telnet is still actually useful for things like terminal servers and the like!

Next, perhaps the most interesting scrapli transport plugin is the asyncssh transport. This transport option represented a very big change for scrapli as the entire "backend" was basically re-worked in order to provide the exact same API for both synchronous and asynchronous applications.

Lastly, the asynctelnet transport is the latest (and perhaps last?!) transport plugin. This transport plugin was built with only the python standard library (just like system/telnet) and as such it is part of scrapli "core".

The final piece of scrapli is the actual "driver" -- or the component that binds the transport and channel together and deals with instantiation of a scrapli object. There is a "base" driver object -- Scrape -- which provides essentially a "raw" SSH (or telnet) connection that is created by instantiating a Transport object, and a Channel object . Scrape provides (via Channel) read/write methods and not much else -- this should feel familiar if you have used paramiko in the past. More specific "drivers" can inherit from this class to extend functionality of the driver to make it more friendly for network devices. In fact, there is a GenericDriver class that inherits from Scrape and provides a base driver to work with if you need to interact with a device not represented by one of the "core" drivers. Next, the NetworkDriver class inherits from GenericDriver. The NetworkDriver isn't really meant to be used directly though, but to be further extended and built upon instead. As this library is focused on interacting with network devices, an example scrapli driver (built on the NetworkDriver) would be the IOSXEDriver -- to, as you may have guessed , interact with devices running Cisco's IOS-XE operating system.

It should be noted that this is a bit of an oversimplification of the architecture of scrapli, but it is accurate . Scrapli has "base", "sync", and "async" versions of the core components. The "base" portion is made up fo mixin classes that get "mixed in" to the sync or async versions of the component. For example there is a NetworkDriverBase class that is "mixed in" to the NetworkDriver and AsyncNetworkDriver classes. The mixin provides consistent helper like functions (sync functions) that can be used by the two driver classes -- this allows the sync/async components to have as little code as possible helping to keep the API consistent for both synchronous and asynchronous users.

Supported Platforms

scrapli "core" drivers cover basically the NAPALM platforms -- Cisco IOS-XE, IOS-XR, NX-OS, Arista EOS, and Juniper JunOS. These drivers provide an interface tailored to network device "screen-scraping" rather than just a generic SSH connection/channel. It is important to note that there is a synchronous and an asynchronous version of each of these drivers. Below are the core driver platforms and regularly tested version.

• Cisco IOS-XE (tested on: 16.12.03)
• Cisco NX-OS (tested on: 9.2.4)
• Juniper JunOS (tested on: 17.3R2.10)
• Cisco IOS-XR (tested on: 6.5.3)
• Arista EOS (tested on: 4.22.1F)

It is unlikely that any additional "core" platforms would be added, however the scrapli_community project is available for users to contribute any other platforms they would like to see scrapli support! Please see the scrapli_community project to check out what community platforms exist!

The "driver" pattern is pretty much exactly like the implementation in NAPALM. The driver extends the base class (Scrape) and the base networking driver class (NetworkDriver) with device specific functionality such as privilege escalation/de-escalation, setting appropriate prompts to search for, and picking out appropriate ntc templates for use with TextFSM, and so on.

All of this is focused on network device type Telnet/SSH cli interfaces, but should work on pretty much any SSH connection (though there are almost certainly better options for non-network type devices!). The "base" (Scrape) and GenericDriver connections do not handle any kind of device-specific operations such as privilege escalation or saving configurations, they are simply intended to be a bare bones connection that can interact with nearly any device/platform if you are willing to send/parse inputs/outputs manually. In most cases it is assumed that users will use one of the "core" drivers.

The goal for all "core" devices will be to include functional tests that can run against vrnetlab containers to ensure that the "core" devices are as thoroughly tested as is practical.

Related Scrapli Libraries

This repo is the "main" or "core" scrapli project, however there are other libraries/repos in the scrapli family -- here is a list/link to all of the other scrapli things!

• scrapli_paramiko -- the paramiko transport driver
• scrapli_ssh2 -- the ssh2-python transport driver
• scrapli_asyncssh -- the asyncssh transport driver
• scrapli_netconf -- scrapli netconf -- netconf driver built on top of scrapli
• nornir_scrapli -- scrapli's nornir plugin
• scrapli_stubs -- scrapli type stubs
• scrapli_community -- scrapli community platforms

Advanced Installation

As outlined in the quick start, you should be able to pip install scrapli "normally":

pip install scrapli

To install from this repositories master branch:

pip install git+https://github.com/carlmontanari/scrapli

To install from this repositories develop branch:

pip install -e git+https://github.com/carlmontanari/scrapli.git@develop#egg=scrapli

To install from source:

git clone https://github.com/carlmontanari/scrapli
cd scrapli
python setup.py install

scrapli has made an effort to have as few dependencies as possible -- in fact to have ZERO dependencies! The "core" of scrapli can run with nothing other than standard library! If for any reason you wish to use paramiko or ssh2-python as a driver, however, you of course need to install those. These "extras" can be installed via pip:

pip install scrapli[paramiko]

The available optional installation extras options are:

• paramiko (paramiko and the scrapli_paramiko transport)
• ssh2 (ssh2-python and the scrapli_ssh2 transport)
• textfsm (textfsm and ntc-templates)
• genie (genie/pyats)
• asynchssh (asyncssh and the scrapli_asyncssh transport)
• netconf (scrapli_netconf)
• community (scrapli_community)

If you would like to install all of the optional extras, you can do so with the full option:

pip install scrapli[full]

As for platforms to run scrapli on -- it has and will be tested on MacOS and Ubuntu regularly and should work on any POSIX system. Windows at one point was being tested very minimally via GitHub Actions builds, however this is no longer the case as it is just not worth the effort. While scrapli should work on windows when using the paramiko or ssh2-python transport drivers, it is not "officially" supported. It is strongly recommended/preferred for folks to use WSL/Cygwin instead of Windows.

Versioning

scrapli, and all scrapli related projects use CalVer versioning standard. All release versions follow the format YYYY.MM.DD, however PyPi will shorten/standardize this to remove leading zeros.

The reason for choosing CalVer is simply to make it very clear how old a given release of scrapli is. While there are clearly some potential challenges around indicating when a "breaking" change occurs due to there not being the concept of a "major" version, this is hopefully not too big a deal for scrapli, and thus far the "core" API has been very stable -- there are only so many things you can/need to do over SSH after all!

Please also note that the CHANGELOG contains notes about each version (and is updated in develop branch while updates are happening), and the "public" API is documented here, and includes the date /version of each public method's creation as well as the latest updated/modified date and any relevant notes.

A final note regarding versioning: scrapli updates are released as often as necessary/there are things to update . This means you should ALWAYS PIN YOUR REQUIREMENTS when using scrapli!! As stated, the "core" API has been very stable, but things will change over time -- always pin your requirements, and keep an eye on the changelog/api docs -- you can "watch" this repository to ensure you are notified of any releases.

Basic Usage

Picking the right Driver

Assuming you are using scrapli to connect to one of the five "core" platforms, you should almost always use the provided corresponding "core" driver. For example if you are connecting to an Arista EOS device, you should use the EOSDriver. You can select this driver "manually" or using the scrapli factory Scrapli (or the async scrapli factory AsyncScrapli).

Importing your driver manually looks like this:

from scrapli.driver.core import EOSDriver

If you are using asyncio, you can use the async variant of the driver:

from scrapli.driver.core import AsyncEOSDriver

The core drivers and associated platforms are outlined below:

Platform/OS	Scrapli Driver	Scrapli Async Driver	Platform Name
Cisco IOS-XE	IOSXEDriver	AsyncIOSXEDriver	cisco_iosxe
Cisco NX-OS	NXOSDriver	AsyncNXOSDriver	cisco_nxos
Cisco IOS-XR	IOSXRDriver	AsyncIOSXRDriver	cisco_iosxr
Arista EOS	EOSDriver	AsyncEOSDriver	arista_eos
Juniper JunOS	JunosDriver	AsyncJunosDriver	juniper_junos

All drivers can be imported from scrapli.driver.core.

If you would rather use the factory class to dynamically select the appropriate driver based on a platform string (as seen in the above table), you can do do so as follows:

from scrapli import Scrapli

device = {
   "host": "172.18.0.11",
   "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
   "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
   "auth_strict_key": False,
   "platform": "cisco_iosxe"
}

conn = Scrapli(**device)
conn.open()
print(conn.get_prompt())

Note that the Scrapli and AsyncScrapli classes inherit from the NetworkDriver and AsyncNetworkDriver classes respectively, so all editor code completion and type indicating behavior should work nicely! For non "core " platforms please see the scrapli_community project.

If you are working with a platform not listed above (and/or is not in the scrapli community project), you have three options:

1. You can use the Scrape driver directly, which you can read about here
2. You can use the GenericDriver which which you can read about here
3. You can use the NetworkDriver which is similar to option 2 but you will need to understand/provide privilege /prompt information so scrapli can properly escalate/deescalate to/from configuration (or other) modes.

In general you should probably simply create a scrapli community platform (read about adding a platform here, but failing that the GenericDriver is probably the simplest path forward.

Note: if you are using async you must set the transport to asyncssh -- this is the only async transport supported at this time!

Basic Driver Arguments

The drivers of course need some information about the device you are trying to connect to. The most common arguments to provide to the driver are outlined below:

Argument	Purpose/Value
host	name/ip of host to connect to
port	port of host to connect to (defaults to port 22)
auth_username	username for authentication
auth_password	password for authentication
auth_secondary	password for secondary authentication (enable password)
auth_private_key	private key for authentication
auth_strict_key	strict key checking -- TRUE by default!
ssh_config_file	True/False or path to ssh config file to use

These arguments may be passed as keyword arguments to the driver of your choice, or, commonly are passed via dictionary unpacking as show below:

from scrapli.driver.core import IOSXRDriver

my_device = {
    "host": "172.18.0.11",
    "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
    "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
    "auth_strict_key": False,
}

conn = IOSXRDriver(**my_device)
conn.open()

NOTE that scrapli enables strict host key checking by default!

Opening and Closing a Connection

scrapli does not open the connection for you when creating your scrapli connection object in normal operations, you must manually call the open method prior to sending any commands to the device as shown below.

from scrapli.driver.core import IOSXRDriver

my_device = {
   "host": "172.18.0.11",
   "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
   "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
   "auth_strict_key": False,
}

conn = IOSXRDriver(**my_device)
conn.open()
response = conn.send_command("show version")

Connections can be closed by calling the close method:

conn.close()

scrapli also supports using a context manager (with block), when using the context manager the connection will be automatically opened and closed for you.

from scrapli.driver.core import IOSXEDriver

my_device = {
    "host": "172.18.0.11",
    "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
    "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
    "auth_strict_key": False,
}

with IOSXEDriver(**my_device) as conn:
    response = conn.send_command("show version")

Sending Commands

When using any of the core network drivers (JunosDriver, EOSDriver, etc.) or the GenericDriver, the send_command and send_commands methods will respectively send a single command or list of commands to the device.

When using the core network drivers, the command(s) will be sent at the default_desired_privilege_level level which is typically "privilege exec" (or equivalent) privilege level. Please see Driver Privilege Levels in the advanced usage section for more details on privilege levels. As the GenericDriver doesn't know or care about privilege levels you would need to manually handle acquiring the appropriate privilege level for you command yourself if using that driver.

Note the different methods for sending a single command versus a list of commands!

from scrapli.driver.core import IOSXEDriver

my_device = {
    "host": "172.18.0.11",
    "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
    "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
    "auth_strict_key": False,
}

conn = IOSXEDriver(**my_device)
conn.open()
response = conn.send_command("show version")
responses = conn.send_commands(["show run", "show ip int brief"])

Finally, if you prefer to have a file containing a list of commands to send, there is a send_commands_from_file method . This method excepts the provided file to have a single command to send per line in the file.

Response Object

All command/config operations that happen in the GenericDriver or any of the drivers inheriting from the NetworkDriver result in a Response object being created. The Response object contains attributes for the command sent (channel_input), start/end/elapsed time, and of course the result of the command sent.

from scrapli.driver.core import IOSXEDriver

my_device = {
    "host": "172.18.0.11",
    "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
    "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
    "auth_strict_key": False,
}

conn = IOSXEDriver(**my_device)
conn.open()
response = conn.send_command("show version")
print(response.elapsed_time)
print(response.result)

If using send_commands (plural!) then scrapli will return a MultiResponse object containing multiple Response objects. The MultiResponse object is for all intents and purposes just a list of Response objects (with a few very minor differences).

In addition to containing the input and output of the command(s) that you sent, the Response object also contains a method textfsm_parse_output (for more on TextFSM support see Textfsm/NTC-Templates Integration) which will attempt to parse and return the received output. If parsing fails, the value returned will be an empty list -- meaning you will always get "structured data" returned, however it will just be an empty object if parsing fails.

>>> structured_result = response.textfsm_parse_output()
>>> print(structured_result)
[['16.4.1', 'IOS-XE', 'csr1000v', '2 days, 22 hours, 10 minutes', 'reload', 'packages.conf', ['CSR1000V'], ['9FKLJWM5EB0'], '0x2102', []]]

Sending Configurations

When using any of the core drivers, you can send configurations via the send_config, send_configs or send_configs_from_file methods which will handle privilege escalation for you. send_config accepts a single string, send_configs accepts a list of strings, and of course send_configs_from_file accepts a string path to a file containing configurations to send. Note that send_configs_from_file -- just like with it's commands sibling -- will treat each line in the file as a configuration element, in this way it behaves much like send_configs.

Lastly, it is good to know that send_config (singular!) will parse the configuration string provided and split it into lines -- this means that the underlying behavior is the same as send_configs, however this method returns a single Response object. This send_config method can be used to send entire configurations to devices in a reliable fashion.

from scrapli.driver.core import IOSXEDriver

my_device = {
    "host": "172.18.0.11",
    "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
    "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
    "auth_strict_key": False,
}

with IOSXEDriver(**my_device) as conn:
    conn.send_configs(["interface loopback123", "description configured by scrapli"])

If you need to get into any kind of "special" configuration mode, such as "configure exclusive", "configure private ", or "configure session XYZ", you can pass the name of the corresponding privilege level via the privilege_level argument. Please see the Driver Privilege Levels section for more details!

Lastly, note that scrapli does not exit configuration mode at completion of a "configuration" event -- this is because scrapli (with the Network drivers) will automatically acquire default_desired_privilege_level before sending a "command" -- so there is no need, from a scrapli perspective, to explicitly exit config mode at end of the configuration session.

Textfsm/NTC-Templates Integration

scrapli supports parsing output with TextFSM and ntc-templates. This of course requires installing TextFSM and having ntc-templates somewhere on your system. When using a platform driver (i.e. IOSXEDriver) the textfsm-platform will be set for you (based on the driver device type). If you wish to parse the output of your send commands, you can use the textfsm_parse_output method of the response object. This method will attempt to find the template for you -- based on the textfsm-platform and the channel-input (the command sent). If textfsm parsing succeeds, the structured result is returned. If textfsm parsing fails, an empty list is returned.

from scrapli.driver.core import IOSXEDriver

my_device = {
    "host": "172.18.0.11",
    "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
    "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
    "auth_strict_key": False,
}

with IOSXEDriver(**my_device) as conn:
    response = conn.send_command("show version")
    structured_result = response.textfsm_parse_output()
    print(structured_result)

scrapli also supports passing in templates manually (meaning not using the pip installed ntc-templates directory to find templates) if desired. The scrapli.helper.textfsm_parse function accepts a string or loaded (TextIOWrapper ) template and output to parse. This can be useful if you have custom or one off templates or don't want to pip install ntc-templates.

from scrapli.driver.core import IOSXEDriver
from scrapli.helper import textfsm_parse

my_device = {
    "host": "172.18.0.11",
    "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
    "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
    "auth_strict_key": False,
}

with IOSXEDriver(**my_device) as conn:
    response = conn.send_command("show version")
    structured_result = textfsm_parse("/path/to/my/template", response.result)

NOTE: If a template does not return structured data an empty list will be returned!

NOTE: Textfsm and ntc-templates is an optional extra for scrapli; you can install these modules manually or using the optional extras install via pip:

pip install scrapli[textfsm]

Cisco Genie Integration

Very much the same as the textfsm/ntc-templates integration, scrapli has optional integration with Cisco's PyATS /Genie parsing library for parsing show command output. While there are parsers for non-Cisco platforms, this is currently just an option for Cisco platforms within scrapli.

from scrapli.driver.core import IOSXEDriver

my_device = {
    "host": "172.18.0.11",
    "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
    "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
    "auth_strict_key": False,
}

with IOSXEDriver(**my_device) as conn:
    response = conn.send_command("show version")
    structured_result = response.genie_parse_output()
    print(structured_result)

NOTE: If a parser does not return structured data an empty list will be returned!

NOTE: PyATS and Genie is an optional extra for scrapli; you can install these modules manually or using the optional extras install via pip:

pip install scrapli[genie]

TTP Integration

The scrapli response object also contains a ttp_parse_output method, that, as you may have guessed, uses the ttp library to parse output received from the device. Other than the obvious difference that this is in fact a different type of parser, the only difference from a usage perspective is that the ttp_parse_output method requires a template string, string path to a template, or loaded (TextIOWrapper ) template string to be passed. This is because there is no index or mapping of platform:command:template as there is with TextFSM/ntc-templates and genie.

An example ttp file (slightly modified from the great ttp quickstart guide) - in this case we'll pretend this file is called "my_template.ttp":

interface {{ interface }}
 ip address {{ ip }} {{ mask }}
 description {{ description }}

from scrapli.driver.core import IOSXEDriver

my_device = {
    "host": "172.18.0.11",
    "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
    "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
    "auth_strict_key": False,
}

with IOSXEDriver(**my_device) as conn:
    response = conn.send_command("show run interface GigabitEthernet1")
    structured_result = response.ttp_parse_output(template="my_template.ttp")
    print(structured_result)

NOTE: If a parser does parse data, ttp will return an empty list (as with the other parser methods)

NOTE: ttp is an optional extra for scrapli; you can install these modules manually or using the optional extras install via pip:

pip install scrapli[ttp]

Handling Prompts

In some cases you may need to run an "interactive" command on your device. The send_interactive method of the GenericDriver or its sub-classes (NetworkDriver and "core" drivers) can be used to accomplish this. This method accepts a list of "interact_events" -- or basically commands you would like to send, and their expected resulting prompt. A third, optional, element is available for each "interaction", this last element is a bool that indicates weather or not the input that you are sending to the device is "hidden" or obfuscated by the device. This is typically used for password prompts where the input that is sent does not show up on the screen (if you as a human are sitting on a terminal typing).

This method can accept one or N "events" and thus can be used to deal with any number of subsequent prompts.

One last important item about this method is that it accepts an argument privilege_level -- the value of this argument should be the name of the privilege level that you would like to execute the interactive command at . This is an optional argument, with a default of the default_desired_privilege_level attribute which is normally "privilege exec" or similar depending on the platform.

from scrapli.driver.core import IOSXEDriver

my_device = {
    "host": "172.18.0.11",
    "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
    "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
    "auth_strict_key": False,
}

with IOSXEDriver(**my_device) as conn:
    interactive = conn.send_interactive(
        [
            ("copy flash: scp:", "Source filename []?", False),
            ("somefile.txt", "Address or name of remote host []?", False),
            ("172.31.254.100", "Destination username [carl]?", False),
            ("scrapli", "Password:", False),
            ("super_secure_password", "csr1000v#", True),
        ]
    )

Telnet

scrapli supports telnet as a transport driver via the standard library module telnetlib. Telnet is a bit of a special case for scrapli, here are the things you need to know if you wish to use Telnet:

• Currently, you must set the port number. At the moment scrapli assumes SSH and defaults to port 22, even if you specify the telnet driver. This could obviously change in the future but for now, specify your telnet port!
• You can set the username and password prompt expect string after your connection object instantiation and before calling the open method -- this means if you have non-default prompts you cannot use scrapli with a context manager and Telnet (because the context manager calls open for you). You can set the prompts using the following attributes of the Scrape object:
  • username_prompt
  • password_prompt
• When using telnet you may need to set the comms_return_char to \r\n the tests against the core platforms pass without this, however it seems that some console server type devices are looking for this \r\n pattern instead of the default \n pattern.

If telnet for some reason becomes an important use case, the telnet Transport layer can be improved/augmented.

SSH Config Support

scrapli supports using OpenSSH configuration files in a few ways. For "system" SSH transport (default setting ), passing a path to a config file will simply make scrapli "point" to that file, and therefore use that configuration files attributes (because it is just exec'ing system SSH!). See the Transport Notes section for details about what Transport supports what configuration options. You can also pass True to let scrapli search in system default locations for an ssh config file (~/.ssh/config and /etc/ssh/ssh_config.)

NOTE -- scrapli does NOT disable strict host checking by default. Obviously this is the "smart" behavior, but it can be overridden on a per host basis in your SSH config file, or by passing False to the "auth_strict_key " argument on object instantiation.

from scrapli.driver.core import IOSXEDriver

my_device = {
    "host": "172.18.0.11",
    "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
    "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
    "auth_strict_key": False,
    "ssh_config_file": "~/my_ssh_config",
}

with IOSXEDriver(**my_device) as conn:
    print(conn.get_prompt())

Advanced Usage

All Driver Arguments

The basic usage section outlined the most commonly used driver arguments, this outlines all of the base driver arguments.

Argument	Purpose/Value	Class
host	name/ip of host to connect to	Scrape
port	port of host to connect to (defaults to port 22)	Scrape
auth_username	username for authentication	Scrape
auth_password	password for authentication	Scrape
auth_secondary	password for secondary authentication (enable password)	NetworkDriver
auth_private_key	private key for authentication	Scrape
auth_private_key_passphrase	passphrase for ssh key	Scrape
auth_strict_key	strict key checking -- TRUE by default!	Scrape
auth_bypass	bypass auth prompts after establishment	Scrape
timeout_socket	timeout value for initial socket connection	Scrape
timeout_transport	timeout value for transport (i.e. paramiko)	Scrape
timeout_ops	timeout value for individual operations	Scrape
timeout_exit	True/False exit on timeout ops exceeded	Scrape
comms_prompt_pattern	regex pattern for matching prompt(s); see platform regex	Scrape
comms_return_char	return char to use on the channel; default \n	Scrape
comms_ansi	True/False strip ansi from returned output	Scrape
ssh_config_file	True/False or path to ssh config file to use	Scrape
ssh_known_hosts_file	True/False or path to ssh known hosts file to use	Scrape
on_open	callable to execute "on init" (end of object creation)	Scrape
on_open	callable to execute "on open"	Scrape
on_close	callable to execute "on exit"	Scrape
transport	system (default), paramiko, ssh2, or telnet	Scrape
transport_options	dictionary of transport-specific arguments	Scrape
privilege_levels	dictionary of privilege levels	NetworkDriver
default_desired_privilege_level	privilege level for "show" commands to be executed at	NetworkDriver
failed_when_contains	list of strings indicating command/config failure	NetworkDriver
textfsm_platform	platform name for textfsm parser	NetworkDriver
genie_platform	platform name for genie parse	NetworkDriver

Most of these attributes actually get passed from the Scrape (or sub-class such as NXOSDriver) into the Transport and Channel classes, so if you need to modify any of these values after instantiation you should do so on the appropriate object -- i.e. conn.channel.comms_prompt_pattern.

Platform Regex

Due to the nature of Telnet/SSH there is no good way to know when a command has completed execution. Put another way , when sending any command, data is returned over a socket, that socket doesn't ever tell us when it is "done " sending the output from the command that was executed. In order to know when the session is "back at the base prompt/starting point" scrapli uses a regular expression pattern to find that base prompt.

This pattern is contained in the comms_prompt_pattern setting or is created by joining all possible prompt patterns in the privilege levels for a "core" device type. In general you should not change the patterns unless you have a good reason to do so!

The "base" Scrape (default, but changeable) pattern is:

"^[a-z0-9.\-@()/:]{1,48}[#>$]\s*$"

NOTE all comms_prompt_pattern "should" use the start and end of line anchors as all regex searches in scrapli are multi-line (this is an important piece to making this all work!). While you don't need to use the line anchors its probably a really good idea! Also note that most devices seem to leave at least one white space after the final character of the prompt, so make sure to account for this! Last important note -- the core drivers all have reliable patterns set for you, so you hopefully don't need to bother with this too much!

The above pattern works on all "core" platforms listed above for at the very least basic usage. Custom prompts or host names could in theory break this, so be careful!

If you use a platform driver, the base prompt is set in the driver so you don't really need to worry about this!

The comms_prompt_pattern pattern can be changed at any time at or after instantiation of a scrapli object, and is done so by modifying conn.channel.comms_prompt_pattern where conn is your scrapli connection object. Changing this can break things though, so be careful! If using any NetworkDriver sub-classes you should modify the privilege level(s) if necessary, and not the comms_prompt_pattern.

On Open

Lots of times when connecting to a device there are "things" that need to happen immediately after getting connected . In the context of network devices the most obvious/common example would be disabling paging (i.e. sending terminal length 0 on a Cisco-type device). While scrapli Scrape (the base driver) and GenericDriver do not know or care about disabling paging or any other on connect type activities, scrapli of course provides a mechanism for allowing users to handle these types of tasks. Even better yet, if you are using any of the core drivers (IOSXEDriver , IOSXRDriver, etc.), scrapli will automatically have some sane default "on connect" actions (namely disabling paging).

If you were so inclined to create some of your own "on connect" actions, you can simply pass those to the on_open argument of Scrape or any of its sub-classes (NetworkDriver, IOSXEDriver, etc.). The value of this argument must be a callable that accepts the reference to the connection object. This allows for the user to send commands or do really anything that needs to happen prior to "normal" operations. The core network drivers disable paging functions all call directly into the channel object send_input method -- this is a good practice to follow as this will avoid any of the NetworkDriver overhead such as trying to attain privilege levels -- things like this may not be "ready" until after your on_open function is executed.

Below is an example of creating an "on connect" function and passing it to scrapli. Immediately after authentication is handled this function will be called and disable paging (in this example):

from scrapli.driver.core import IOSXEDriver

def iosxe_disable_paging(conn):
    conn.channel.send_input("term length 0")

my_device = {
    "host": "172.18.0.11",
    "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
    "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
    "auth_strict_key": False,
    "on_open": iosxe_disable_paging
}

with IOSXEDriver(**my_device) as conn:
    print(conn.get_prompt())

Note that this section has talked almost exclusively about disabling paging, but any other "things" that need to happen in the channel can be handled here. If there is a prompt/banner to accept you should be able to handle it here. The goal of this "on connect" function is to allow for lots of flexibility for dealing with whatever needs to happen for devices -- thus decoupling the challenge of addressing all of the possible options from scrapli itself and allowing users to handle things specific for their environment.

Lastly, while the on_open method should be synchronous or asyncio depending on the driver -- meaning that if using an async driver, it will await the on_open callable, so it must be asynchronous!

On Close

As you may have guessed, on_close is very similar to on_open with the obvious difference that it happens just prior to disconnecting from the device. Just like on_open, on_close functions should accept a single argument that is a reference to the object itself. As with most things scrapli, there are sane defaults for the on_close functions, but you are welcome to override them with your own function if you so chose!

Timeouts

scrapli supports several timeout options:

• timeout_socket
• timeout_transport
• timeout_ops

timeout_socket is exactly what it sounds where possible. For the ssh2 and paramiko transports we create our own socket and pass this to the created object (paramiko or ssh2 object). The socket is created with the timeout value set in the timeout_socket attribute. For telnet and system transports we do not create a socket ourselves so this value is used slightly differently.

For telnet, the timeout_socket is used as the timeout for telnet session creation. After the telnet session is created the timeout is reset to the timeout_transport value (more on that in a second).

For system transport, timeout_socket governs the ConnectTimeout ssh argument -- which seems to be very similar to socket timeout in paramiko/ssh2.

timeout_transport is intended to govern the timeout for the actual transport mechanism itself. For paramiko and ssh2, this is set to the respective libraries timeout attributes. For telnet, this is set to the telnetlib timeout value after the initial telnet session is stood up. For system transport, this value is used as the timeout value for read and write operations (handled by operation timeout decorator).

Finally, timeout_ops sets a timeout value for individual operations -- or put another way, the timeout for each send_input operation.

Keepalives

NOTE - Keepalives have been temporarily removed from scrapli. AFAIK nobody is/was using them and they need a re -write... stay tuned, they'll be back soonish :)

In some cases it may be desirable to have a long running connection to a device, however it is generally a bad idea to allow for very long timeouts/exec sessions on devices. To cope with this scrapli supports sending "keepalives ". For "normal" ssh devices this could be basic SSH keepalives (with ssh2-python and system transports). As scrapli is generally focused on networking devices, and most networking devices don't support standard keepalives, scrapli also has the ability to send "network" keepalives.

"network" keepalives default to sending u"\005" which is equivalent of sending CTRL-E (jump to end (right side) of line). This is generally an innocuous command, and furthermore is never sent unless the keepalive thread can acquire a channel lock. This should allow scrapli to keep sessions alive as long as needed.

Driver Privilege Levels

The "core" drivers understand the basic privilege levels of their respective device types. As mentioned previously , the drivers will automatically attain the "privilege_exec" (or equivalent) privilege level prior to executing "show " commands. If you don't want this "auto-magic" you can use the base driver (Scrape) or the GenericDriver. The privileges for each device are outlined in the platforms driver.py file - each privilege is an object of the base PrivilegeLevel class which uses slots for the attributes. This used to be a named tuple, however as this was immutable it was a bit of a pain for users to modify things on the fly.

As an example, the following privilege levels are supported by the IOSXEDriver:

1. "exec"
2. "privilege_exec"
3. "configuration"

Each privilege level has the following attributes:

• pattern: regex pattern to associate prompt to privilege level with
• name: name of the priv level, i.e. "exec"
• previous_priv: name of the "lower"/"previous" privilege level
• deescalate: command used to deescalate from this privilege level (or an empty string if no lower privilege)
• escalate: command used to escalate to this privilege level (from the lower/previous privilege)
• escalate_auth: True/False there is auth required to escalate to this privilege level
• escalate_prompt: pattern to expect when escalating to this privilege level, i.e. "Password:" or any empty string

If you wish to manually enter a privilege level you can use the acquire_priv method, passing in the name of the privilege level you would like to enter. In general you probably won't need this too often though as the driver should handle much of this for you.

from scrapli.driver.core import IOSXEDriver

my_device = {
    "host": "172.18.0.11",
    "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
    "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
    "auth_strict_key": False,
}
with IOSXEDriver(**my_device) as conn:
    conn.acquire_priv("configuration")

Configure Exclusive and Configure Private (IOSXR/Junos)

IOSXR and Junos platforms have different configuration modes, such as "configure exclusive" or "configure private ". These alternate configuration modes are represented as a privilege level just like the "regular" configuration mode. You can acquire an "exclusive" configuration session on IOSXR as follows:

from scrapli.driver.core import IOSXRDriver

my_device = {
    "host": "172.18.0.11",
    "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
    "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
    "auth_strict_key": False,
}
with IOSXRDriver(**my_device) as conn:
    conn.acquire_priv("configuration_exclusive")

Of course you can also pass this privilege level name to the send_configs or send_configs_from_file methods as well:

from scrapli.driver.core import IOSXRDriver

my_device = {
    "host": "172.18.0.11",
    "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
    "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
    "auth_strict_key": False,
}
with IOSXRDriver(**my_device) as conn:
    conn.send_configs(configs=["configure things"], privilege_level="configuration_exclusive")

Note that the name of the privilege level is "configuration_exclusive" -- don't forget to write the whole thing out!

Configure Session (EOS/NXOS)

EOS and NXOS devices support configuration "sessions", these sessions are a little bit of a special case for scrapli . In order to use a configuration session, the configuration session must first be "registered" with scrapli -- this is so that scrapli can create a privilege level that is mapped to the given config session/config session name . The register_configuration_session method that accepts a string name of the configuration session you would like to create -- note that this method raises a NotImplementedError for platforms that do not support config sessions . Theregister_configuration_session method creates a new privilege level for you and updates the transport class with the appropriate information internally (see next section). An example of creating a session for an EOS device called "my-config-session" can be seen here:

from scrapli.driver.core import EOSDriver

my_device = {
    "host": "172.18.0.14",
    "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
    "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
    "auth_secondary": "VR-netlab9",
    "auth_strict_key": False,
}
with EOSDriver(**my_device) as conn:
    conn.register_configuration_session(session_name="my-config-session")
    print(conn.privilege_levels["my-config-session"])
    print(conn.privilege_levels["my-config-session"].name)
    print(conn.privilege_levels["my-config-session"].pattern)

<scrapli.driver.network_driver.PrivilegeLevel object at 0x7fca10070820>
my-config-session
^[a-z0-9.\-@/:]{1,32}\(config\-s\-my\-con[a-z0-9_.\-@/:]{0,32}\)#\s?$

Modifying Privilege Levels

When creating a configuration session, or modifying a privilege level during runtime, scrapli needs to update some internal arguments in order to always have a full "map" of how to escalate/deescalate, as well as to be able to match prompts based on any/all of the patterns available in the privilege levels dictionary. The register_configuration_session method will automatically handle updating these internal arguments, however if you modify any of the privilege levels (or add a priv level on the fly without using the register method) then you will need to manually call the update_privilege_levels method.

Using Scrape Directly

All examples in this readme have shown using the "core" network drivers such as IOSXEDriver. These core network drivers are actually sub-classes of an ABC called NetworkDriver which itself is a sub-class of the GenericDriver which is a sub-class of the base Scrape class -- the namesake for this library. The Scrape object can be used directly if you prefer to have a much less opinionated or less "auto-magic" type experience. Scrape does not provide the same send_command/send_commands/send_configs methods, nor does it disable paging, or handle any kind of privilege escalation/de-escalation. Scrape is a much more basic "paramiko"-like experience. Below is a brief example of using the Scrape object directly:

from scrapli import Scrape

my_device = {
    "host": "172.18.0.11",
    "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
    "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
    "auth_strict_key": False,
}

with Scrape(**my_device) as conn:
    conn.channel.send_input("terminal length 0")
    response = conn.channel.send_input("show version")

Without the send_command and similar methods, you must directly access the Channel object when sending inputs with Scrape.

Using the GenericDriver

Using the Scrape driver directly is nice enough, however you may not want to have to change the prompt pattern, or deal with accessing the channel to send commands to the device. In this case there is a GenericDriver available to you. This driver has a very broad pattern that it matches for base prompts, has no concept of disabling paging or privilege levels (like Scrape), but does provide send_command, send_commands, send_interactive, and get_prompt methods for a more NetworkDriver-like experience.

Hopefully this GenericDriver can be used as a starting point for devices that don't fall under the core supported platforms list.

from scrapli.driver import GenericDriver

my_device = {
    "host": "172.18.0.11",
    "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
    "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
    "auth_strict_key": False,
}

with GenericDriver(**my_device) as conn:
    conn.send_command("terminal length 0")
    response = conn.send_command("show version")
    responses = conn.send_commands(["show version", "show run"])

Using a Different Transport

scrapli is built to be very flexible, including being flexible enough to use different libraries for "transport " -- or the actual Telnet/SSH communication. By default scrapli uses the "system" transport which quite literally uses the ssh binary on your system (/usr/bin/ssh). This "system" transport means that scrapli has no external dependencies as it just relies on what is available on the machine running the scrapli script.

In the spirit of being highly flexible, scrapli allows users to swap out this "system" transport with another transport mechanism. The other supported transport mechanisms are paramiko, ssh2-python and telnetlib . paramiko and ssh2-python were originally part of the core of scrapli, but have since been moved to their own repositories to be used as plugins to keep the codebase as simple as possible. The transport selection can be made when instantiating the scrapli connection object by passing in paramiko, ssh2, telnet, or asyncssh to force scrapli to use the corresponding transport mechanism. If you are using the asyncssh transport you must use an async driver!

While it will be a goal to ensure that these other transport mechanisms are supported and useful, the focus of scrapli development will be on the "system" SSH transport.

Example using paramiko as the transport:

from scrapli.driver.core import IOSXEDriver

my_device = {
    "host": "172.18.0.11",
    "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
    "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
    "auth_strict_key": False,
    "transport": "paramiko"
}

with IOSXEDriver(**my_device) as conn:
    print(conn.get_prompt())

Currently the only reason I can think of to use anything other than "system" as the transport would be to test scrapli on a Windows host, to use telnet, to use ssh2 for super speed, or to use asyncio. If there are other good reasons please do let me know!

Auth Bypass

NOTE Currently only supported with system and telnet transports!

Some devices, such as Cisco WLC, have no "true" SSH authentication, and instead prompt for credentials (or perhaps not even that) after session establishment. In order to cope with this corner case, the auth_bypass flag can be set to True which will cause scrapli to skip all authentication steps. Typically this flag would be set and a custom on_open function set to handle whatever prompts the device has upon SSH session establishment.

See the non core device example to see this in action.

Transport Options

Because each transport has different options/features available, it doesn't make sense to try to put all possible arguments in the Scrape or NetworkDriver drivers, to address this an argument transport_options has been added . This is exactly what it sounds like -- arguments that can be passed to the selected transport class. As these arguments will be transport-specific, please check the docs/docstrings for your preferred transport to see what is available.

A simple example of passing additional SSH arguments to the SystemSSHTransport class is available here.

Raise For Status

The scrapli Response and MultiResponse objects both contain a method called raise_for_status. This method's purpose is to provide a very simple way to raise an exception if any of the commands or configs sent in a method have failed.

from scrapli.driver.core import IOSXEDriver

my_device = {
    "host": "172.18.0.11",
    "auth_username": "vrnetlab",
    "auth_password": "VR-netlab9",
    "auth_strict_key": False,
}

with IOSXEDriver(**my_device) as conn:
    commands = ["show run", "tacocat", "show version"]
    responses = conn.send_commands(commands=commands)

Inspecting the responses object from the above example, we can see that it indeed is marked as Success: False, even though the first and last commands were successful:

>>> responses
MultiResponse <Success: False; Response Elements: 3>
>>> responses[0]
Response <Success: True>
>>> responses[1]
Response <Success: False>
>>> responses[2]
Response <Success: True>

Finally, we can all the raise_for_status method to have scrapli raise the ScrapliCommandFailure exception if any of the configs/commands failed:

>>> responses.raise_for_status()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/Users/carl/dev/github/scrapli/scrapli/response.py", line 270, in raise_for_status
    raise ScrapliCommandFailure()
scrapli.exceptions.ScrapliCommandFailure

FAQ

• Question: Why build this? Netmiko exists, Paramiko exists, Ansible exists, etc...?
  • Answer: I built ssh2net to learn -- to have a goal/target for writing some code. scrapli is an evolution of the lessons learned building ssh2net. About mid-way through building ssh2net I realized it may actually be kinda good at doing... stuff. So, sure there are other tools out there, but I think scrapli its pretty snazzy and fills in some of the gaps in other tools. For example scrapli is 100% compliant with strict mypy type checking, very uniformly documented/linted, contains a results object for every operation, is very very fast, is very flexible, and in general pretty awesome! Finally, while I think in general that SSH "screen scraping" is not "sexy" or even "good", it is the lowest common denominator for automation in the networking world. So I figured I could try to make the fastest, most flexible library around for SSH network automation!
• Question: Is this better than Netmiko/Paramiko/Ansible?
  • Answer: Nope! It is different though! The main focus is just to be stupid fast. It is very much that. It should be super reliable too as the timeouts are very easy/obvious to control, and it should also be very very very easy to adapt to any other network-y type CLI by virtue of flexible prompt finding and easily modifiable on connect functions.
• Question: Is this easy to use?
  • Answer: Yep! The base usage with Scrape is pretty straight forward -- the thing to remember is that it doesn't do "things" for you like Netmiko does for example, so its a lot more like Paramiko in that regard this just means that you need to disable paging yourself (or pass an on_open callable to do so), handle privilege modes and things like that. If you want a more "tailored" experience you can use one of the "core" platforms, or check out the scrapli community project to ssee what is available there!
• I wanna go fast!
  • Hmmm... not a question but I dig it. If you wanna go fast you gotta learn to drive with the fear... ok, enough Talladega Nights quoting for now. In theory using the ssh2 transport is the gateway to speed... being a very thin wrapper around libssh2 means that its basically all C and that means its probably about as fast as we're reasonably going to get. All that said, scrapli by default uses the system transport which is really just using your system ssh.... which is almost certainly libssh2/openssh which is also C. There is a thin layer of abstraction between scrapli and your system ssh but really its just reading/writing to a file which Python should be doing in C anyway I would think. In summary... while ssh2 is probably the fastest you can go with scrapli, the difference between ssh2 and system transports in limited testing is very small, and the benefits of using system transport (native ssh config file support!!) probably should outweigh the speed of ssh2 -- especially if you have control persist and can take advantage of that with system transport!
• Other questions? Ask away!

Transport Notes, Caveats, and Known Issues

paramiko

• Currently there seems to be a cosmetic bug where there is an error message about some socket error... but everything seems to work as expected.

SSH Config Supported Arguments

• user
• port
• identity_file

Known Issues

• None yet!

ssh2-python

SSH Config Supported Arguments

• user
• port
• identity_file

Known Issues

• Arista EOS uses keyboard interactive authentication which is currently broken in the pip-installable version of ssh2-python (as of October 2020). GitHub user Red-M has contributed to and fixed this particular issue but the fix has not been merged. If you would like to use ssh2-python with EOS I suggest cloning and installing via Red-M's repository or my fork of Red-M's fork!

system

• Any arguments passed to the SystemSSHTransport class will override arguments in your ssh config file. This is because the arguments get crafted into an "open_cmd" (the command that actually fires off the ssh session), and these cli arguments take precedence over the config file arguments. The most important implication of this is the auth_strict_key setting, so keep that in mind!
• If you set ssh_config_file to False the SystemSSHTransport class will set the config file used to /dev/null so that no ssh config file configs are accidentally used.
• There is zero Windows support for system ssh transport - I would strongly encourage the use of WSL or cygwin and sticking with systemssh instead of using paramiko/ssh2 natively in Windows -- system ssh is very much the focus of development for scrapli!
• SystemSSH needs to have a terminal set -- without this it fails. My understanding is that without a terminal being set there is no tty which causes the ptyprocess portions of scrapli to not be able to read from the session . The fix for this is simply to ensure that there is a TERM set -- for example in the GitHub Actions setup for systemssh tests we simply set TERM=xterm as an environment variable. Setting this within scrapli did not seem to have any affect, but is something worth revisiting later -- meaning it would be nice to have scrapli be able to set this for itself so users don't have to care about it.

SSH Config Supported Arguments

• literally whatever your system supports as scrapli just execs SSH on your system!

Known Issues

• Not an "issue" necessarily, but many users end up having kex/cipher negotiation issues -- this is easily fixed by setting up your ssh config file to have the appropriate settings OR passing transport options containing the ssh args that allow for the kex/cipher you need, see transport options example for details.

telnet

• See the telnet section!

SSH Config Supported Arguments

• Obviously none!

Known Issues

• None yet!

asyncssh

• None yet

SSH Config Supported Arguments

• None yet

Known Issues

• ?!?!

Linting and Testing

Linting

This project uses black for auto-formatting. In addition to black, nox will execute pylama, and pydocstyle for linting purposes . Nox will also run mypy, with strict type checking. Docstring linting is handled by darglint which has been quite handy!

All commits to this repository will trigger a GitHub action which runs nox, but of course its nicer to just run that before making a commit to ensure that it will pass all tests!

Typing

As stated, this project is 100% type checked and will remain that way. The value this adds for IDE auto-completion and just general sanity checking/forcing writing of more type-check-able code is worth the small overhead in effort.

Testing

Testing is broken into two main categories -- unit and functional. Unit is what you would expect -- unit testing the code. Functional testing connects to virtual devices in order to more accurately test the code. Unit tests cover quite a bit of the code base due to mocking the FileIO that the channel reads/writes to. This gives a pretty high level of confidence that at least object instantiation and channel read/writes will generally work... Functional tests against virtual devices helps reinforce that and gets coverage for the transport classes.

For more ad-hoc type testing there is a smoke folder in the tests directory -- for "smoke tests". These are simple scripts that don't really "test" (as in no assertions or pytest or anything), but are useful for basic testing that things have not gotten broken while working on new features. These have been handy for spot testing during development so rather than leave them in a private directory they are included here in case they are useful for anyone else!

Unit Tests

Unit tests can be executed via pytest:

python -m pytest tests/unit/

Or using the following make command:

make test_unit

If you would like to see the coverage report and generate the html coverage report:

make cov_unit

Setting up Functional Test Environment

Executing the functional tests is a bit more complicated! First, thank you to Kristian Larsson for his great tool vrnetlab! All functional tests are built on this awesome platform that allows for easy creation of containerized network devices.

Basic functional tests exist for all "core" platform types (IOSXE, NXOS, IOSXR, EOS, Junos) as well as basic testing for Linux. Vrnetlab currently only supports the older emulation style NX-OS devices, and not the newer VM image n9kv. I have made some very minor tweaks to vrnetlab locally in order to get the n9kv image running. I also have made some changes to enable scp-server for IOSXE/NXOS devices to allow for config replaces with NAPALM right out of the box. You can get these tweaks in my fork of vrnetlab. Getting going with vrnetlab is fairly straightforward -- simply follow Kristian's great readme docs.

For the Arista EOS image -- prior to creating the container you should boot the device and enter the zerotouch disable command. This allows for the config to actually be saved and prevents the interfaces from cycling through interface types in the container (I'm not clear why it does that but executing this command before building the container "fixes" this!). An example qemu command to boot up the EOS device is:

qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -display none -machine pc -monitor tcp:0.0.0.0:4999,server,nowait -m 4096 -serial telnet:0.0.0.0:5999,server,nowait -drive if=ide,file=vEOS-lab-4.22.1F.vmdk -device pci-bridge,chassis_nr=1,id=pci.1 -device e1000,netdev=p00,mac=52:54:00:54:e9:00 -netdev user,id=p00,net=10.0.0.0/24,tftp=/tftpboot,hostfwd=tcp::2022-10.0.0.15:22,hostfwd=tcp::2023-10.0.0.15:23,hostfwd=udp::2161-10.0.0.15:161,hostfwd=tcp::2830-10.0.0.15:830,hostfwd=tcp::2080-10.0.0.15:80,hostfwd=tcp::2443-10.0.0.15:443

Once booted, connect to the device (telnet to container IP on port 5999 if using above command), issue the command zerotouch disable, save the config and then you can shut it down, and make the container.

The docker-compose file here will be looking for the container images matching this pattern, so this is an important bit! The container image names should be:

scrapli-cisco-iosxe
scrapli-cisco-nxos
scrapli-cisco-iosxr
scrapli-arista-eos
scrapli-juniper-junos

You can tag the image names on creation (following the vrnetlab readme docs), or create a new tag once the image is built:

docker tag [TAG OF IMAGE CREATED] scrapli-[VENDOR]-[OS]

NOTE If you are going to test scrapli, use my fork of vrnetlab -- I've enabled telnet, set ports, taken care of setting things up so that NAPALM can config replace, etc.

Functional Tests

Once you have created the images, you can start all of the containers with a make command:

make start_dev_env

Conversely you can terminate the containers:

make stop_dev_env

To start a specific platform container:

make start_dev_env_iosxe

Substitute "iosxe" for the platform type you want to start.

Most of the containers don't take too long to fire up, maybe a few minutes (running on my old macmini with Ubuntu, so not exactly a powerhouse!). That said, the IOS-XR device takes about 15 minutes to go to "healthy" status. Once booted up you can connect to their console or via SSH:

Device	Local IP
iosxe	172.18.0.11
nxos	172.18.0.12
iosxr	172.18.0.13
eos	172.18.0.14
junos	172.18.0.15
linux	172.18.0.20

The console port for all devices is 5000, so to connect to the console of the iosxe device you can simply telnet to that port locally:

telnet 172.18.0.11 5000

Credentials for all devices use the default vrnetlab credentials:

Username: vrnetlab

Password: VR-netlab9

You should also run the prepare_devices script in the functional tests, or use the Make commands to do so for you . This script will deploy the base config needed for testing. The make commands for this step follow the same pattern as the others:

• prepare_dev_env will push the base config to all devices
• prepare_dev_env_XYZ where XYZ == "iosxe", "nxos", etc. will push the base config for the specified device.

Once the container(s) are ready, you can use the make commands to execute tests as needed:

• test will execute all currently implemented functional tests as well as the unit tests
• test_functional will execute all currently implemented functional tests
• test_iosxe will execute all unit tests and iosxe functional tests
• test_nxos will execute all unit tests and nxos functional tests
• test_iosxr will execute all unit tests and iosxr functional tests
• test_eos will execute all unit tests and eos functional tests
• test_junos will execute all unit tests and junos functional tests
• test_linux will execute all unit tests and basic linux functional tests (this is really intended to test the base Scrape driver instead of the network drivers)

Other Functional Test Info

IOSXE is the only platform that is testing SSH key based authentication at the moment. The key is pushed via NAPALM in the setup phase. This was mostly done out of laziness, and in the future the other platforms may be tested with key based auth as well, but for now IOSXE is representative enough to provide some faith that key based auth works!

Roadmap

This section may not get updated much, but should at least provide a bit of an idea about what is to come for scrapli!

• Improve the ssh2 and asyncssh plugins
• Continue to expand scrapli community (mostly through new contributors help!)
• Revamp/fix (or remove?) the keepalive components