Building an App for network automation

We’ll pick up where we left off in the previous chapter with our Nautobot IP ACLs App, extending it first to render the IP ACL configuration CLI based on the data stored in Nautobot, then to use Netmiko to push this rendered configuration directly to network devices.

Note

Much as in the previous chapter, this is something of a contrived example to help you get your hands dirty with App development and network automation using Apps. In your real network and real deployment of Nautobot, you’d probably want to use the Nautobot Golden Config App and/or Nautobot Firewall Models App to manage and implement this sort of device configuration, rather than writing your own app specifically for this purpose.

Rendering IP ACL config using Jinja2

We’re going to use Jinja2 as our templating engine for the rendering of the IP ACL configuration CLI. As you may recall, Nautobot uses this library natively as part of its Export Templates...