napalm-device-types/README.md

napalm-device-types

Abstract intermediate device-type base classes for NAPALM drivers.

Instead of inheriting directly from napalm.base.NetworkDriver, a driver can inherit from one of the device-type classes here to gain a richer, type-specific contract:

# without napalm-device-types
class OpenWrtDriver(NetworkDriver):
    ...

# with napalm-device-types
from napalm_device_types import AccessPointDriver

class OpenWrtDriver(AccessPointDriver):
    ...

Why?

NAPALM's NetworkDriver defines a common interface for all network devices. In practice, devices fall into distinct categories with very different capabilities. A switch exposes spanning-tree and PoE data; a firewall exposes NAT tables and VPN tunnels; a NAS exposes disk pools and shares. Writing these methods directly in a concrete driver mixes concerns and makes drivers harder to discover and compare.

napalm-device-types sits in between: it adds one well-typed layer of abstract methods per device category, so every driver for the same category exposes the same interface.

Installation

pip install napalm-device-types

Requires Python ≥ 3.9 and NAPALM ≥ 4.0.

Available base classes

Class	Target devices	Example implementations
AccessPointDriver	Wireless access points	OpenWrt, Ubiquiti UniFi, Cisco Meraki AP
SwitchDriver	Ethernet switches	Cisco IOS, Arista EOS, Juniper EX
FirewallDriver	Firewalls & UTM appliances	pfSense, Fortinet FortiOS, Cisco ASA
HypervisorDriver	Hypervisors & virtualisation platforms	Proxmox VE, VMware ESXi, KVM/libvirt
StorageDriver	Storage appliances & NAS/SAN	TrueNAS, Synology DSM, QNAP QTS

Usage

Access Point

from napalm_device_types import AccessPointDriver

class OpenWrtDriver(AccessPointDriver):

    def get_wireless_clients(self):
        # return List[WirelessClientDict]
        ...

    def get_ssids(self):
        # return Dict[str, SSIDDict]
        ...

Switch

from napalm_device_types import SwitchDriver

class CiscoIOSDriver(SwitchDriver):

    def get_spanning_tree(self):
        # return Dict[str, SpanningTreeDict]
        ...

    def get_poe_status(self):
        # return PoESummaryDict
        ...

Firewall

from napalm_device_types import FirewallDriver

class PfSenseDriver(FirewallDriver):

    def get_nat_translations(self):
        # return List[NATTranslationDict]
        ...

    def get_vpn_tunnels(self):
        # return Dict[str, VPNTunnelDict]
        ...

Hypervisor

from napalm_device_types import HypervisorDriver

class ProxmoxDriver(HypervisorDriver):

    def get_vms(self):
        # return List[VMDict]
        ...

    def snapshot_create(self, name, snapshot, description="", include_memory=False):
        ...

Storage / NAS

from napalm_device_types import StorageDriver

class TrueNASDriver(StorageDriver):

    def get_disks(self):
        # return List[PhysicalDiskDict]
        ...

    def get_shares(self):
        # return Dict[str, NASShareDict]
        ...

Return types

All return types are TypedDict classes defined in napalm_device_types.models. Import them directly for type annotations in your driver:

from napalm_device_types.models import (
    PhysicalDiskDict,
    DiskPoolDict,
    NASShareDict,
    VolumeSnapshotDict,
)

Development

git clone https://github.com/chrismanivong/napalm-device-types.git
cd napalm-device-types
pip install -e ".[dev]"

Run type-checking:

mypy napalm_device_types

Contributing

1. Fork the repository
2. Create a feature branch (git checkout -b feature/router-driver)
3. Implement your changes
4. Open a Pull Request

License

Apache-2.0 – see LICENSE for details.