The purpose of this repository is to provide a starting point for your exploration into the DNA Center APIs. Postman is a great way to get familiar with APIs in general, but in this demo we will focus on using Python and the requests library. Please feel free to explore using any additional means.
The cisco_dnacenter folder in this repository is a git submodule that points to a repository I biuld as I studied for the ENAUTO test. You can use this as reference for building your own helper functions.
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/jandiorio/enauto-dnacenter-demo.git
The first step in learning any API is figuring out where to find the documntation. The DNA Center APIs can be found on-box by navigating to Platform->Developer Toolkit->APIs.
Example: https://{{your_dna_center}}/dna/platform/app/consumer-portal/developer-toolkit/apis
The second place to find documentation about the DNA Center APIs is the DevNet Website. Navigate to https://developer.cisco.com -> Technologies -> Networking -> Cisco DNA Center Platform.
There is a lot of great information about APIs on this site. Here is a direct link DNA Center APIs on DevNet
It's a good idea to read through the API documenation.
There is already an SDK for DNA Center that was developed by Cisco, but in the interest of learning, I have created my own API wrapper that encapsulates only the API endpoints that we will use.
Below is a screenshot of the methods that have been created to drive the capabilities of this learning demo for working with the DNA Center APIs.
The first step when working with any new API is figuring out how we will authenticate (if authentication is required).
Cisco DNA Center uses a combination of HTTP Basic Auth and a Token.
The 1_login.py imports this API wrapper using this import cisco_dnacenter.dnac.dnac_api as dnac_api.
This script is also using an library named python-dotenv to load environment variables based on the content in the .env file. This allows you to keep your credentials in a local file that is excluded from your remote repositories (using .gitignore).
To execute this python script use the following command:
python 1_login.py
The method in the API wrapper will update the python request.session object with the headers that include the X-Auth-Token value.