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Overview As network engineers, we are very much used to making configuration changes via the CLI, something we've relied on since the start of our networking careers. However, in the past few years, there has been a push towards network automation, with tools like Ansible and Python becoming

Introduction One key component of Ansible is its inventory. Ansible’s inventory lets you organise and define the targets you will automate. Whether you're automating a small network or a large-scale deployment, a solid inventory setup—and knowing how to work with it—makes all the difference. In

Introduction to PyeAPI The Python Client for eAPI (pyeapi) is a native Python library wrapper around Arista EOS eAPI. It provides a set of Python language bindings for configuring Arista devices. In this blog post, we will look at how to install pyeapi, some prerequisites and some examples. The pyeapi

Introduction In this blog post, we’re going to explore Jinja2, an incredibly versatile tool that’s very useful for network automation. At its core, Jinja2 is a template engine. You can think of it as a stencil in arts and crafts. Just as you might use a stencil to

What is JSONata? Dealing with nested JSON can be challenging—looping, complex key lookup chains, etc. Though there are various options out in the community for easing this pain, the one project I always enjoyed was JSONata. It's easy to use and has strong transformation features—something lacking

Within this post we will step through how to create a CSV file within Ansible. But before we do ... What is a CSV File Used For? A CSV (Comma Separated Values) file is a simple text format for storing tabular data. It's widely used because of its straightforward

Today I want to share with you 3 of my favourite commands when using Pytest. But first of all... Whats Pytest? For those of you who are new to Pytest (checkout new instructor-led course here): Pytest is a flexible, mature and feature-rich framework for testing Python code. Pytest has been

I have to admit, after adding the final test for checking the Nornir course code repo, it felt good. 56 tests in total. Job done! Well, kind of. After performing a final run and feeling smug that I was getting a screen of green passes, it raised the next question:

In this post, I'm going to show you how to dynamically generate tests within Pytest using, in my opinion, one of its best features - parametrization. But first of all ... What is Pytest? Pytest is a flexible open-source framework for testing Python code. Its key strength lies in