net-textorial

Introduction

Originally developed by @JulioPDX, this was a simple app showing off the power of a text-based user interface (TUI) and how it can be used with network automation.

With recent changes, it has evolved into a learning tool that shows network engineers the differences between raw (human-friendly) CLI output and parsed (structured) output. The tool will take any 'show' command and produce the raw and parsed outputs (using ntc-templates for parsing). This will be valuable for engineers that want to learn and see the differences between raw (unstructured) and parsed (structured) data outputs.

Under the hood, this tool is leveraging Netmiko and Textual. Thank you to all involved!

If you'd like an overview of the tool, check out my YouTube video!

Features

• It just works: Set your device CLI credentials as environment variables and let it rip! No need to define a device type! All device types are automagically determined using Netmiko's awesome ssh_autodetect module.
• Vendor agnostic: This tool is not built for a particular vendor. With vendor-agnostic libraries being used under the hood, many different device vendors and device types are supported. See Device Support section for more details.

Get Started

git clone https://github.com/dannywade/net-textual
cd net-textual
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Basic Usage

1. Set your device CLI credentials as environment variables. The variable key names are NET_TEXT_USER and NET_TEXT_PASS. If device CLI credentials are not set, the default value of admin is set for both username and password.

   NET_TEXT_USER=<your username>
   NET_TEXT_PASS=<your password>

2. Run the app

   python net.py

3. Enter the hostname/IP of the device and a valid 'show' command in the input box

   dist-router1 show ip route

Supported Devices/Parsers

Device Support

Any device that is supported by Netmiko can be used with this tool. Under the hood, all device connections are created using the Netmiko library. Here are some of the popular supported (and tested) platforms by Netmiko:

• Arista vEOS
• Cisco ASA, IOS, IOS-XE, IOS-XR, NX-OS
• HP ProCurve
• Juniper Junos
• Linux

Parser Support

With Genie and ntc-templates (TextFSM) being the two major parsing libraries in the game, there's a goal to support both libraries. Currently, only ntc-templates is supported and used to parse all command output. Genie parsers will be supported in the future.

ChatGPT Integration (optional)

If you would like the assistance of ChatGPT to help explain the parsed output, there's an optional integration using OpenAI's API. All you need to do is set your OpenAI API token as an environment variable and net-textorial will ask ChatGPT to explain the parsed output.

    OPEN_AI_KEY=<your token>

DISCLAIMER: Please make your own interpretation of the ChatGPT results. The results may differ. For more information, reference OpenAI's terms of use.

Demo

net-textual-demo.mov