Recommended Tools

These are some of the tools that are used in this tutorial. Other tools are also included for completeness.

Infrastructure

Linux Environment: A native Linux system or WSL2 on Windows is necessary to run Containerlab and Docker.
Docker: Required to run the containerized router images.
Containerlab: This is essential to create the lab environment.

These libraries allow your automation scripts to communicate with the devices:

These are used for manual exploration and "reverse engineering" before writing code:

gnmic: A CLI client for gNMI. It is used to explore device capabilities, retrieve state, and test telemetry subscriptions.
netconf-console2: A CLI clients for NETCONF. They are useful for checking connectivity, retrieving modules, and testing XML filters without writing Python code.

pyang: The essential tool for YANG visualization. It converts verbose YANG source files into a readable tree format (pyang -f tree), which acts as your map for constructing configuration paths.
yanglint (libyang2-tools): A command-line utility used for offline validation. It checks your XML or JSON payloads against the YANG schema to catch errors before they ever touch a live device.
yangson: A Python library used for programmatic validation and data manipulation within automation scripts.

Python 3 & venv: Used for writing the automation logic; virtual environments (venv) are recommended to isolate dependencies.
Jinja2: A templating engine used to separate the structure of YANG-modeled payloads from the variable data (e.g., IP addresses), making the code more modular.
xmltodict: Useful for converting XML-based NETCONF responses into Python dictionaries for easier processing.
VSCode with YANG extension: Provides syntax highlighting and tree navigation for YANG files, which is critical when browsing large vendor model repositories.