Setting up nornir

You can pick Windows, Linux or MacOS host to setup your nornir instance. This guide assumes a version 3.7 installation of Python and at least 1 virtual machine that will be managed. One virtual machine should be a Linux. I am going to use in the course a CentOS7, for the network demonstration GNS3 will be used with two cisco IOS routers.

The machine can have as low as 2vCPU and 2GB of ram.

Installing nornir

On the host machine I install the virtualenv module in python with the following command.

python -m pip install virtualenv

If you have multiple versions of python make sure your default python is the version 3.7, otherwise you need to give the full path for the command to work.

After this you can create your little environment where the setup will live.

Mine lives on the Desktop\NornirProject folder of my user, so after navigating there the following command is issued.

virtualenv nornirproject

Once this is done we will need 2 more folders, one is scripts the other is inventory.

You can now activate your project and install nornir.

# This is for windows
nornirproject\Scripts\activate.bat
# This is for linux
source nornir/bin/activate
# install nornir
pip install nornir

Now nornir is installed, the next section will give you a quick tour about basic layout of the project and how you can Initialize your project files.