Because Python is the most popular open source coding language, there are many developers who contribute their expertise by creating specific modules and sharing them for others to use. These modules are a specific set of functions or instructions that are used to perform specialized tasks and can be called easily in our programs. The modules can be easily called using the import command inside the scripts. Python has many built-in modules that are directly called using import, but for specialized modules, an external installation is needed. Luckily, Python provides a very easy way to download and install these modules.

As an example, let's install a module named Netmiko that can help us work on logging into network devices more efficiently. Python provides a well-documented reference for each of the modules, and for our module, the documentation can be found at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/netmiko. For installation, all we have to do is go into the folder from the command line where python.exe is installed or is present. There is a sub folder in that location called scripts.

Inside that folder, we have two options that can be used for installing modules, easy_install.exe or pip.exe.

Installing the library for Python, can be done in two ways:

• The syntax of easy_install is as follows:

easy_install <name of module>

For example:

easy_install netmiko

• The syntax of pip install is as follows:

pip install <name of module>

For example:

pip install netmiko