Officially supported method for Panorama backup through API

[sprabhu]

Dear Team, 

It's look like there are 2 methods for Panorama backup through API.

curl -o {{server_backup_file}} -k https://{{Panorama_IP_@}}/api/?type=export&category=configuration&key={{Panorama_API_key>}}

or

curl -k https://{{Panorama_IP_@}}/api/?type=op&cmd=<save><config><to>{{Panorama_backup_file}}</to></config></save>&key={{Panorama_API_key}}

then retrieve the file through SCP

But the outputs look different:

[admin@elkrsg01 ~]$ file backup*
backup_API80.xml: UTF-8 Unicode text, with very long lines
backup_SCP80.xml: XML 1.0 document, ASCII text

[admin@elkrsg01 ~]$ wc -lwc backup*
1112 1439 126998 backup_API80.xml
3986 4313 177296 backup_SCP80.xml
5098 5752 304294 total

Customer would like to know which method is fully supported?

Regards

Sam Prabhu

[JimmyHolland]

@RobertShawver The API docs can be found here: https://docs.paloaltonetworks.com/pan-os/10-1/pan-os-panorama-api.html, and specifically the export request type of API call here: https://docs.paloaltonetworks.com/pan-os/10-1/pan-os-panorama-api/pan-os-xml-api-request-types/expor... 

[RobertShawver]

Thanks for your reply, here is my real issue though. Because of the log4j we had to move to 9.1.12-h3, but that broke the Schedule Config export. So I'd like to be able to automate the backup and export of the Panorama config because it still works via command line.

I can manually log into the Panorama via cli and run "scp export config-bundle to" the problem is, how do I automate that?

[JimmyHolland]

@RobertShawver First things first, ensure you have logged a ticket to get Scheduled Config Export investigated and fixed, let's make sure the root cause of the problem gets fixed.

Meanwhile, if you just want to automate/mimic the behaviour of a human logging in via SSH to the CLI and performing commands, you could look into using "expect" in a simple script: https://www.google.com/search?q=ssh+expect+script&oq=ssh+expect+script. You could run that script regularly using cron or something similar. Other methods to do the same thing are available in different programming languages too.

However, if you are going to need a regularly executing script, I would argue that using the API would be much cleaner than an expect script. Here is a very simple example below, AND PLEASE NOTE that API keys should be treated much more securely than shown in the example here where the API key is stored/hardcoded in a script, please use a vault or something similar to securely store credentials!

#!/bin/bash

# Variables
host="1.1.1.1"
key="your-PANOS-API-key-here"
filename="exported-running-config.xml"

# Export running config file
curl -k "https://$host/api/?key=$key&type=config&action=show" > $filename

Hope that helps

[RobertShawver]

Thanks!  The "fix" is coming with 9.1.13, but I'll wait till it's "preferred" before jumping on it only to find out that version breaks something else.  🙂