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You're reading from Hands-On Enterprise Automation with Python Automate common administrative and security tasks with Python

Product type Paperback

Published in Jun 2018

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781788998512

Length 398 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Languages

Python

Tools

Ansible

Concepts

Build Automation

Author (1):

Aly

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Table of Contents (25) Chapters

Title Page

Packt Upsell

Contributors

Preface

1. Setting Up Our Python Environment FREE CHAPTER

2. Common Libraries Used in Automation

3. Setting Up the Network Lab Environment

4. Using Python to Manage Network Devices

5. Extracting Useful Data from Network Devices

6. Configuration Generator with Python and Jinja2

7. Parallel Execution of Python Script

8. Preparing a Lab Environment

9. Using the Subprocess Module

10. Running System Administration Tasks with Fabric

11. Generating System Reports and System Monitoring

12. Interacting with the Database

13. Ansible for System Administration

14. Creating and Managing VMware Virtual Machines

15. Interacting with the OpenStack API

16. Automating AWS with Boto3

17. Using the Scapy Framework

18. Building a Network Scanner Using Python

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Index

What is Fabric?

Fabric (http://www.fabfile.org/) is a high-level Python library that is used to connect to remote servers (through the paramiko library) and execute predefined tasks on them. It runs a tool called fab on the machine that hosts the fabric module. This tool will look for a fabfile.py file, located in the same directory that you run the tool in. The fabfile.py file contains your tasks, defined as a Python function that is called from the command line to start the execution on the servers. The Fabric tasks themselves are just normal Python functions, but they contain special methods that are used to execute commands on remote servers. Also, at the beginning of fabfile.py, you need to define some environmental variables, such as the remote hosts, username, password, and any other variables needed during execution:

Installation

Fabric requires Python 2.5 to 2.7. You can install Fabric and all of its dependencies using pip, or you can use a system package manager, such as yum or apt...