Toolbox

This page includes a collection of my personal favorite tools, libraries, or resources in general within the area of Network Automation, Software Development and anything that might be useful/interesting in the future.

Python Libraries

• textfsm – utility to parse strings in python based on a state machine with regular expressions, together with the NTC Templates a powerful utility
• Jinja2 – common template language, designed for HTML but frequently used to generate CLI configurations
• Mako – another template language, uses a syntax that sometimes looks like shell scripts
• requests – HTTP client library
• ciscoconfparse – awesome library to extract data from text-based Cisco configuration files (or text data with some level of hierarchy)
• cerberus – library to validate JSON data based on a custom but powerful schema language
• celery – framework to work with asynchronous tasks in python (separate worker or on distributed systems)
• netmiko – multivendor library to simplify the interaction with network devices using SSH and Telnet
• pandas – data analysis library in python to work with large data-sets
• xlrd – library to work with Excel files in python
• openpyxl – another library to work with Excel files in python but easier to use compared with xlrd
• network-to-code netutils – collection of utilities for common network automation tasks
• Junos PyEZ – library to interact with Juniper JUNOS devices based on the XML API
• ncclient – NETCONF client library
• Invoke – library for CLI-invokable tasks
• Click – framework to create command-line tools in python

Web-Development with Python

• Django – powerful, batteries-included web framework for python
• Django REST framework – framework to build REST APIs on top of Django
• FastAPI – async framework to build REST APIs
• Flask – micro framework for web services in python (nowadays I prefer FastAPI/Django)

CSS Frameworks

• MVP – a minimalist stylesheet for HTML elements
• bootstrap – Framework used with the Product Database
• uikit – Framework used with the Network Configuration Generator

Tools

• Jupyter notebooks – web-based notebook format (not only) for python
• packer – utility to create virtual machines in different formats
• vagrant – tool to provision and configure VMs (or entire environments) based on a text file
• ngrok – simple solution to provide a remote connection without exposing resources to the internet
• ansible – powerful batteries-included automation framework that is useful for server automation and DevOps use-cases, but I don’t recommend it for network automation cases because of the maintenance effort that is associated to it
• Cisco Modelling Labs (CML) – Cisco’s solution to simulate/virtualize Network Equipment
• EVE-NG – Alternative solution to simulate/virtualize Network Equipment
• dolt and dolthub – tool to use Git like data together with a MySQL compatible interface
• shell-in-a-box – Web-client for shell sessions to servers
• wetty – good alternative to shell-in-a-box which is better maintained
• Webhook.site – test page for webhooks
• Cisco Advanced NETCONF Explorer – excellent way to test and validate NETCONF interaction of YANG modules against a particular device

Remote Access and VPNs

• Tailscale – awesome tool to create virtual point-to-multipoint VPNs
• Wireguard – simple VPN solution compared to IPsec
• Netbird.io – interesting alternative to Tailscale

NETCONF/YANG Resources

• netconfcentral.org
• YANG catalog

Other Interesting Site/Talks/Articles

• Design Patterns in Python (Refactoring-Guru) – my de facto reference for design patterns
• "What nobody tells you about documentation" (youtube.com) – talk that gives you a guidance and structure on how to create a documentation based on the Documentation system at divio.com
• OWASP Top 10
• OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework
• Git Cheatsheet

There are also some more resources and tools on my GitHub stars page, which I use also as a watch list.