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!
- Quick Start Guide
- scrapli: What is it
- Supported Platforms
- Related Scrapli Libraries
- Advanced Installation
- Versioning
- Basic Usage
- Advanced Usage
- FAQ
- Transport Notes, Caveats, and Known Issues
- Linting and Testing
- Todo and Roadmap
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
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
- 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 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
Extra, generally platform/transport-specific, examples/documentation/information will be stored in the Wiki associated with this repository. You can find it here.
Other scrapli related docs/blogs/videos/info:
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 two available "transports" in scrapli "core" -- both 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:
- paramiko (optional extra)
- ssh2-python (optional extra)
- OpenSSH/System available SSH (scrapli core)
- telnetlib (scrapli core)
- asyncssh (optional extra)
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 seems to have stalled.
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 ssh2-python -- 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!
Finally, the most recent scrapli transport plugin is the asyncssh
transport. This transport option represents 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. Currently asyncssh is the only asynchronous transport supported
, but of course there could be additional transports (telnetlib3 perhaps?) in the future!
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
abstract base class inherits from GenericDriver
. The
NetworkDriver
isn't really meant to be used directly though (hence why it is an ABC), 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.
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 currently 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)
In the future it would be possible for folks to contribute additional "community" drivers, however, is unlikely that any additional "core" platforms would be added.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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 two
options: you can use the Scrape
driver directly, which you can read about here or you
can use the GenericDriver
which which you can read about here. In general you should
probably use the GenericDriver
and not mess about using Scrape
directly.
Note: if you are using async you must set the transport to asyncssh
-- this is the only async transport supported
at this time!
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!
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")
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.
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', []]]
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.
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]
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]
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),
]
)
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 theScrape
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.
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())
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 |
keepalive | True/False send keepalives to the remote host | Scrape |
keepalive_interval | interval in seconds for keepalives | Scrape |
keepalive_type | network or standard; see keepalive section for details | Scrape |
keepalive_pattern | if network keepalive; pattern to send | 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 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 |
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
.
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
.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
:
- "exec"
- "privilege_exec"
- "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")
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!
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?$
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.
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 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"])
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, or to use asyncio. If there are other good reasons please do let me know!
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.
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.
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
- 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 buildingssh2net
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!
- Answer: I built
- 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 anon_open
callable to do so), handle privilege modes and things like that. That said you can use one of the available drivers to have a more Netmiko-like experience -OR- write your own driver as this has been built with the thought of being easily extended.
- Answer: Yep! The base usage with
- Why do I get a "conn (or your object name here) has no attribute channel" exception?
- Answer: Connection objects do not "auto open", and the channel attribute is not assigned until opening the
connection. Call
conn.open()
(or your object name in place of conn) to open the session and assign the channel attribute. Alternatively you can use any of the drivers with a context manager (see what I did there? WITH... get it?) which will auto-magically open and close the connections for you.
- Answer: Connection objects do not "auto open", and the channel attribute is not assigned until opening the
connection. Call
- 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 thesystem
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... whilessh2
is probably the fastest you can go with scrapli, the difference betweenssh2
andsystem
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!
- 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
- Other questions? Ask away!
- 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.
- user
- port
- identity_file
- None yet!
- user
- port
- identity_file
- Arista EOS uses keyboard interactive authentication which is currently broken in the pip-installable version
of ssh2-python (as of January 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!
- Windows users using python3.8 may need to use Red-M's fork, quick testing in GitHub actions for py3.8 on Windows had install failures for ssh2-python.
- Use the context manager where possible! More testing needs to be done to confirm/troubleshoot, but limited testing seems to indicate that without properly closing the connection there appears to be a bug that causes Python to crash on MacOS at least. More to come on this as I have time to poke it more! I believe this is only occurring on the latest branch/update (i.e. not on the pip installable version). (April 2020 -- this may be fixed... need to retest ...)
- 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 theauth_strict_key
setting, so keep that in mind! - If you set
ssh_config_file
toFalse
theSystemSSHTransport
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 setTERM=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.
- literally whatever your system supports as scrapli just execs SSH on your system!
- When connecting to Juniper devices, if a user has setup control persist in their ssh_config file to the actual end
Juniper device (instead of or in addition to a jump/proxy host), the Junos device will force a pty which is not
readable by the "pipes" style session/setup, ultimately this will cause auth to fail. If no username/password is
setup, scrapli will raise a
ScrapliAuthenticationFailed
exception. If there is a username/password (that works ), scrapli will continue authentication using that, however it will take forever because scrapli tries, and fails , to connect/auth via private key first. The "fix" here is to not have control persist setup to the end network device. Control persist does not seem to work with Juniper devices anyway, so not a big deal, but it is a bit tricky to identify this problem as it just appears as an auth failure (and there isn't a terribly great way to handle this).
- See the telnet section!
- Obviously none!
- None yet!
- None yet
- None yet
- scrapli asyncssh is not production ready yet!
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!
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 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 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
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.
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 devicesprepare_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 teststest_functional
will execute all currently implemented functional teststest_iosxe
will execute all unit tests and iosxe functional teststest_nxos
will execute all unit tests and nxos functional teststest_iosxr
will execute all unit tests and iosxr functional teststest_eos
will execute all unit tests and eos functional teststest_junos
will execute all unit tests and junos functional teststest_linux
will execute all unit tests and basic linux functional tests (this is really intended to test the baseScrape
driver instead of the network drivers)
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!
This section may not get updated much, but should at least provide a bit of an idea about what is to come for scrapli!
- Plugins -- build framework to allow for others to easily build driver plugins if desired
- Ensure v6 stuff works as expected.
- Continue to add/support ssh config file things.
- Get back to work on scrapli_netconf!