Creating and applying a configuration template with Jinja2 and netmiko

With the recipes so far, we have only read back information from our network devices. What we have not done so far is apply a new configuration to our device.

In Chapter 3, Building Configuration Templates Using Jinja2, we saw how we can use the Jinja2 templating language to build a new configuration file based on an existing template. In this recipe, we are going to combine Jinja2's ability to render a configuration template into an actual configuration file and netmiko's ability to apply a file as a new configuration to a network device to go from a configuration template to a configuration that is applied to a real device.

Getting ready

Open your code editor and start by creating a file called apply_config.py. Next, navigate your terminal to the same directory that you just created the apply_config.py file in.

Additionally, we'll need a Jinja2 template, so in the same directory as...