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Connecting to WAPI

To establish a connection to your NIOS Grid via the WAPI, you'll need to instantiate an instance of the Gift class in the ibx-sdk. The Gift class, requires you have the following information:

  • Grid Manager hostname or IP Address
  • NIOS Administrative User credentials username and password
  • (optionally) the NIOS version wapi_ver

Scripts can be fashioned like the examples provided in this SDK to obtain these properties as command line arguments. In addition, you could use a .env file or roll your own config.yaml file. The last thing you want to do is hard-code these in your scripts which would be very insecure. The scripts contained in this SDK use the Python @click module which provides convenient CLI argument parsing and validation.

There are three (4) ways of instantiating the Gift class:

  1. positional arguments
  2. named arguments
  3. instance variables
  4. dictionary of properties or key-value pairs

Positional Arguments

To establish a connection to a NIOS Grid Manager using positional arguments, use the following:

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from ibx_sdk.nios.gift import Gift

grid_mgr = 'infoblox.localdomain'
wapi_ver = '2.11'
ssl_verify = False
username = 'admin'
password = 'infoblox'

wapi = Gift(grid_mgr, wapi_ver, ssl_verify)

wapi.connect(username, password)

Warning

While this works and is acceptable, we do not recommend using positional arguments. Instead, leverage named arguments to remove any abiguity. Positional arguments require specific order - if you get the order wrong the method/call will fail and you may have a hard time figuring out how to resolve it.

Named Arguments

Instead of positional arguments it's recommended you use named args and parameters as shown below:

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from ibx_sdk.nios.gift import Gift

wapi = Gift(grid_mgr='infoblox.localdomain', wapi_ver='2.11', ssl_verify='/path/to/certfile')
wapi.connect(username='admin', password='infoblox')

Instance Variables

In the next example, we establish our connection to the NIOS Grid Manager by instantiating the Gift class, and building it up using the Gift class properties.

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from ibx_sdk.nios.gift import Gift

wapi = Gift()
wapi.grid_mgr = 'infoblox.localdomain'
wapi.wapi_ver = '2.11'
wapi.ssl_verify = '/path/to/certfile'

username = 'admin'
password = 'infoblox'

wapi.connect(username, password)

Tip

By instantiating an empty instance of the Gift class, you can make the wapi instance variable global instead of having to pass it around in your scripts to other functions and methods. See Below.

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from ibx_sdk.nios.gift import Gift

wapi = Gift()


def get_grid():
    # the wapi instance is visible in the method
    res = wapi.get(f'{wapi.url}/grid')


def main():
    wapi.grid_mgr = 'infoblox.localdomain'
    wapi.wapi_ver = '2.11'
    wapi.ssl_verify = '/path/to/certfile'

    wapi.connect(username='admin', password='infoblox')
    get_grid()

line 3 - We're instantiating the Gift class without any attributes set on the instance globally
lines 12-14 - we build up the wapi instance
line 16 - we establish our connection to the NIOS Grid Manager
line 17 - we call a method/function in the code to get the Grid object
lines 6-8 - we make a call with the wapi instance. It's visible to the function because we made it global

If a Gift instance is not global, you will need to pass it around to any methods and functions which use it. Our previous code would now look more like this:

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from ibx_sdk.nios.gift import Gift


def get_grid(wapi):
    # the wapi instance is visible in the method
    res = wapi.get(f'{wapi.url}/grid')


def main():
    wapi = Gift()
    wapi.grid_mgr = 'infoblox.localdomain'
    wapi.wapi_ver = '2.11'
    wapi.ssl_verify = '/path/to/certfile'

    wapi.connect(username='admin', password='infoblox')
    get_grid(wapi)

Notice how we have to pass the wapi instance to the get_grid function. We MUST do this if the wapi instance is a locally scoped variable instead of a global one.

Dictionary of properties

In addition to the above, you can instantiate the Gift class using a dictionary and passing that into the constructor shown below:

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from ibx_sdk.nios.gift import Gift

username = "admin"
password = "infoblox"
props = {
    "grid_mgr": "infoblox.localdomain",
    "wapi_ver": "2.11",
    "verify_ssl": '/path/to/certfile'
}
wapi = Gift(**props)

wapi.connect(username, password)

This will attempt to use BASIC AUTH to establish a connection with the Grid Manager infoblox.localdomain using the admin user account and password. The wapi.connect() method will return an WapiRequestException if the connection fails. This example shows how to build up the Gift object by passing in a dictionary of key-value pairs.