Quick Start

In order to connect to a NETCONF server we can use one of the connect methods from the netconf_client.connect module. In our example we will connect to a NETCONF server running over SSH, so we will use the connect_ssh function.:

from netconf_client.connect import connect_ssh

with connect_ssh(
    host="192.0.2.1",
    port=830,
    username="admin",
    password="password",
) as sesssion:
    # TODO: Do things with the session object
    pass

The object returned from any of the connect functions is a Session object. It acts as a context manager, and as such it should generally be used alongside a with statement. It is importat to either use a with statement with the object, or to manually call Session.close in order to free the sockets associated with the connection.

The Session object can be used to send and receive raw messages. However, a higher-level API is desireable in most circumstances. For this we can use the Manager class.

The Manager class is from the netconf_client.ncclient module. The module overall attempts to mimick the most common uses of the ncclient API (another, Open Source, Python NETCONF client). Most of the common NETCONF operations such as performing an <edit-config> or a <get> are implemented as functions of this class.

In this example we will perform an <edit-config> for a single node, and then run a <get-config> to see the change.:

from netconf_client.connect import connect_ssh
from netconf_client.ncclient import Manager

with connect_ssh(
    host="192.0.2.1",
    port=830,
    username="admin",
    password="password",
) as session:
    mgr = Manager(session, timeout=120)
    mgr.edit_config(
        target="running",
        config="""
          <config xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:netconf:base:1.0">
            <service-alpha xmlns="http://example.com">
              <simple-string>Foo</simple-string>
            </service-alpha>
          </config>
        """,
    )
    print(mgr.get_config(source="running").data_xml)

An instance of the Manager class should be a drop-in replacement for a manager object from ncclient.