jevgenious / netpalm

ReST based network device broker

Why NetPalm? netpalm is a ReST API into your dusty old network devices, netpalm makes it easy to push and pull network state from your apps. netpalm can abstract and render structured data both inbound and outbound to your network devices native telnet, SSH, NETCONF or RESTCONF interface. NetPalm leverages popular napalm, netmiko, ncclient and requests library's for network device communication, these powerful libs supprt a vast number of vendors and OS

Netpalm Features

• Talks a Rest API to your app and CLI/NETCONF/RESTCONF to your network devices
• Provides a multi-level abstraction interface for service modeling of Create, Retrieve, Delete methods
• Ability to write your own service templates
• Per device task queuing (Ensure you dont overload your VTY's)
• Large amount of supported multivendor devices ( cheers to the netmiko & napalm & ncclient lads )
• Supports TextFSM for parsing/structuring device data (includes ntc-templates)
• Supports Jinja2 for model driven deployments of config onto devices accross napalm, netmiko and ncclient
• Can be used to execute any python script via the ReST API and includes passing in of parameters
• Includes large postman collection of examples
• Supports automated download and installation of TextFSM templates from http://textfsm.nornir.tech online TextFSM development tool
• Automatically generates a JSON schema for any Jinja2 Template
• Can render NETCONF XML responses into JSON on the fly
• Can render Jinja2 templates only if required via the API
• Asynchronous parallel processing
• Task oriented

Concepts

Netpalm acts as a ReST broker for NAPALM, Netmiko, NCCLIENT or a Python Script. It uses TextFSM or Jinja2 to model and transform both ingress and egress data if required. You make an API call to netpalm and it will establish a queue to your device and start sending configuration

Using Netpalm

API catalog

Please view the API docs here

Postman example - getconfig method

check response

Postman example - getconfig method with textfsm arg

netpalm also supports all arguments for the transport libs, simply pass them in as below

check response

Rapid template development and deployment

netpalm is integrated into http://textfsm.nornir.tech so you can ingest your templates with ease

Included Postman Collection

netpalm comes bundled with a postman collection to make it easy to get going

Container Installation

ensure you first have docker installed

sudo apt-get install docker.io
sudo apt-get install docker-compose

clone in netpalm

git clone https://github.com/tbotnz/netpalm.git
cd netpalm

build container

sudo docker build -t netpalm .
sudo docker-compose up -d

import the postman collection, set the ip addresses to that of your docker host and off you go (default netpalm port is 9000)

http://$(yourdockerhost):9000

Configuring Netpalm

edit the config.json file too set params as required

{
    "apikey": "2a84465a-cf38-46b2-9d86-b84Q7d57f288",
    "listen_port": 9000,
    "listen_ip":"0.0.0.0",
    "redis_task_ttl":500,
    "redis_task_timeout":500,
    "redis_server":"redis",
    "redis_port":6379,
    "redis_core_q":"process",
    "txtfsm_index_file":"backend/plugins/ntc-templates/index",
    "txtfsm_template_server":"http://textfsm.nornir.tech",
    "custom_scripts":"backend/plugins/custom_scripts/",
    "jinja2_templates":"backend/plugins/jinja2_templates/"
}

Useful Netpalm Resources

Netpalm getting started blog:

• Netpalm Intro Part 1
• Netpalm Intro Part 2
• Netpalm Intro Part 3

Netpalm slack channel

#netpalm on networktocode.slack.com

License

All code belongs to that of its respective owners