Networking is awesome but some tasks may be quite boring and repetitive. For  new campus network installations a lot of time is used just to put a basic initial configuration template on switches.

Each vendor has its proprietary method to distribute configs automagically but sometimes the effort to setup the system is simply too much.

A common practice is to prepare a template in a test environment then copy it changing the IP address, hostname and a few other parameters. That’s a manual and error prone procedure.

I took the chance to write a quick Python script to automate the process and generate the config files reading the data from a csv file and a template.

How it works?

The script reads a csv and a template files and uses Jinja2  to create all the single config files.

How to use it?

1. create a template using the Jinja2 sintax like this:

   hostname {{hostname}} inte vlan 1 ip address {{ip}} netmask {{netmask}} username {{username}} password {{password}}

Notice the values between “{{ }}” will be replaced with the values read from the csv file

2. create a csv file with the values:

   lines starting with # are comments

   #hostname,ip,netmask,username,password sw1,10.0.0.1,255.255.255.0,admin,sup3rs3cr3t sw2,10.0.0.2,255.255.255.0,admin,sup3rs3cr3t sw3,10.0.0.3,255.255.255.0,admin,sup3rs3cr3t sw4,10.0.0.4,255.255.255.0,admin,sup3rs3cr3t sw5,10.0.0.5,255.255.255.0,admin,sup3rs3cr3t

3. Run the script. The parameters are: csv file, template file, directory where the config will be stored:

    python cfgmaker_jinja2.py list.csv template.txt CGFS

The output

The output of the scritp are 5 files in the CFGS folder with all the values:

hostname sw1
inte vlan 1
ip address 10.0.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0
username admin password sup3rs3cr3t

hostname sw2
inte vlan 1
ip address 10.0.0.2 netmask 255.255.255.0
username admin password sup3rs3cr3t

hostname sw3
inte vlan 1
ip address 10.0.0.3 netmask 255.255.255.0
username admin password sup3rs3cr3t

hostname sw4
inte vlan 1
ip address 10.0.0.4 netmask 255.255.255.0
username admin password sup3rs3cr3t

hostname sw5
inte vlan 1
ip address 10.0.0.5 netmask 255.255.255.0
username admin password sup3rs3cr3t

Where’s the code?

You can find the source code and the example files in BitBucket .