Panix, an NXAPI library

Panix is a python3 NXAPI convenience library. It internally uses json and returns the user python native data structures. It leverages requests for the json-rpc handling.

NXAPI is a Cisco Systems Inc. feature on recent NX-OS devices running a supported firmware that opens a http(s) API interface using JSON-RPC to execute commands on the device.

Panix offers some helper classes to make the structured output more workable.

Quickstart

First, make sure that on your target device, feature nxapi is supported and active.

# show feature
Feature Name         Instance State
-------------------- -------- -----
...
nxapi                1        enabled
...

You will want to check the programmability guide of your platform on Cisco.com on how to properly enable nxapi on it, if it is not already.

Once you have activated it, you can use Panix to execute commands on the device:

from panix import NXAPI

nxos = NXAPI('nxos_switch', username='admin', password='secret', scheme='https', port=8080)


# Text output of the command
sh_ver_text = nxos('show version')

# Some commands have structured output
sh_ver_data = nxos('show version', parsed=True)

# The structure isn't that great, Panix has helpers
from panix.helpers.version import version_helper

sh_ver_data = version_helper(sh_ver_data)

print(sh_ver_data['system_version'])
# '8.1(1)'

Acknowledgements

Thanks to MaartenD for coming up with the name