netmiko

What it is and what it does

Netmiko is a multi-vendor SSH library designed to automate network device management by providing a unified interface for executing show commands and configuration changes across different network platforms. Rather than requiring developers to write low-level SSH and regex parsing logic for each device type, Netmiko abstracts these details away—you define a device dictionary with connection parameters, instantiate a ConnectHandler, and call methods like send_command() or send_config_set() to interact with the device. The library handles SSH session management, command mode transitions, and output parsing internally.

The package depends on paramiko for SSH transport, pyserial for serial connections, textfsm and ntc-templates for structured output parsing, pyyaml and ruamel.yaml for configuration handling, scp for file transfer, and rich for terminal output formatting. It supports modern Python versions (3.10 through 3.14) and is actively maintained with no known security vulnerabilities. The library is well-suited for network engineers building automation scripts, configuration management tools, or monitoring systems that need to interact with CLI-based network devices.

Use it for

• Gather interface statistics and routing tables from multiple Cisco, Arista, or Juniper devices in a single script without vendor-specific SSH logic
• Apply configuration changes across a fleet of network devices by passing a list of commands to send_config_set()
• Parse structured data from show command output using TextFSM templates for programmatic analysis
• Build network inventory tools that query device facts and system information via SSH without manual state management
• Automate backup of running configurations from network devices and store them centrally
• Transfer files to and from network devices using the integrated SCP support

Worth the install?

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Install

netmiko on PyPI

Before you install

Low install friction with a pure-Python wheel distribution. The package is actively maintained with recent releases and has accumulated 4246 repository stars since its first release in 2015, indicating stable, long-term community support.

Requires SSH access to the target network device; device_type must match a supported platform in netmiko's CLASS_MAPPER.

License in practice

MIT license permits commercial and private use with minimal restrictions, making it suitable for most network automation projects without licensing concerns.

Quickstart

from netmiko import ConnectHandler

device = {
    'device_type': 'cisco_ios',
    'host': '10.10.10.10',
    'username': 'admin',
    'password': 'password',
}

net_connect = ConnectHandler(**device)
output = net_connect.send_command('show ip int brief')
print(output)
net_connect.disconnect()

Package facts

Evidence: netmiko-4.7.0-py3-none-any.whl

Tags

More Networking packages

See also napalm · scrapli · unicon.plugins · paramiko · unicon · junos-eznc · jumpssh · pyats.connections · netconf-client · ntc-templates