Configuring all your network devices one by one over the command line interface can be tedious. Spare your fingers and enable automation by using this model based approach which allows you to automatically provision all your devices using the RESTCONF protocol with a Python script and configuration files.
- Install Python > 3.6 and pip
- Install the required libraries by running the command
pip install -r requirements.txt
RFC 8040 (RESTCONF) states:
Configuration data and state data are exposed as resources that can be retrieved with the GET method. Resources representing configuration data can be modified with the DELETE, PATCH, POST, and PUT methods. Data is encoded with either XML [W3C.REC-xml-20081126] or JSON [RFC7159]
You will need to provide these resources by building XML templates for the capabilities you want to use and then writing a YAML configuration with the specific values for every device. With the templates and the configuration file this script will put together the necessary REST calls to provision your devices and send them out.
To build a template you could look for the exact YANG data model you need and create an XML template from it. The easier way is to configure one of the devices by hand over the CLI and read the XML back by reading the appropriate RESTCONF URI. Sadly, to quote Cisco Learning Labs:
One aspect true of all REST APIs is the importance of the URI in identifying the data being requested or configured, and RESTCONF is no exception. A unique aspect of RESTCONF is that it lacks any true "API Documentation" that a developer would use to learn how to use it. Rather, the YANG Models themselves ARE the API documentation.
Oh great. But the format is not too hard, as all RESTCONF URIs follow the same format. Again from Cisco Learning Labs:
https://<ADDRESS>/<ROOT>/data/<[YANG MODULE:]CONTAINER>/<LEAF>[?<OPTIONS>]
Example: To get the current BGP configuration you can use curl to make a GET request to the corresponding URI:
curl --user python --insecure https://10.3.255.104/restconf/data/native/router/bgp/
Once you got all the necessary XMLs you can replace the values that you want as variables with Jinja2 placeholders, place them in the template folder and add the name and value specific to the device to the corresponding section of the configuration file.
The best way to get familiar with the configuration file structure is to read the provided example in configuration.yaml.
The YAML structure is hierarchical and the first level are the different devices. The second level (in configuration) contains different sections each relating to a capability that needs to be configured. Important: Every section in the configuration file needs a corresponding template with the same name in the template folder.
The leaf_url field denotes the RESTCONF URI leaf for PUTting the corresponding resource.
Prepare the configuration and template files as stated above and start the script:
python restconf_provision.py