pygments-switch-cli

Disclaimer: this project is 100% AI-generated. Every line of code, test and documentation in this repository was written by Claude Opus 5 (Anthropic), driven through Claude Code. It ships with an automated test suite and CI, and the lexers have been exercised against the configurations in examples/ — but the code has not been reviewed line by line by a human, and it has not been validated against a broad corpus of real production configurations. Treat it as you would any unreviewed dependency, and please report anything it gets wrong.

Pygments lexers for network switch command line interfaces, so configuration snippets in MkDocs, Sphinx and anything else built on Pygments come out highlighted instead of grey.

Install it and seven new languages become available to every Pygments front end — no plugin registration, no theme changes:

pip install pygments-switch-cli

```eos
interface Ethernet1
   description spine1:Ethernet1/1
   no switchport
   ip address 10.1.1.1/31
```

Supported platforms

Platform	Aliases	Filenames
Arista EOS	eos, arista, arista-eos, aristaeos	*.eos
Cisco NX-OS	nxos, nx-os, cisco-nxos, nexus	*.nxos
Dell SmartFabric OS10	os10, dell-os10, dellos10, smartfabric	*.os10
Cumulus Linux NCLU (net)	nclu, cumulus, cumulus-nclu, net-commands	*.nclu
Cumulus Linux NVUE (nv)	nvue, nv, cumulus-nvue	*.nvue
SONiC (config/show)	sonic, sonic-cli	*.sonic
FRRouting / vtysh	frr, frr-conf, vtysh, frrouting	frr.conf, bgpd.conf, zebra.conf, *.frr, …

Cumulus Linux ships two CLIs — NCLU (net add ...) through 4.x and NVUE (nv set ...) from 4.4 onward — so each gets its own lexer. FRRouting is the routing stack under Cumulus Linux, SONiC and others, and frr.conf is what operators usually paste, so it is lexed separately too.

None of these aliases collide with a lexer built into Pygments, and built-in lexers always win alias lookups, so a future Pygments release adding its own eos would silently shadow this one. If a snippet suddenly loses its highlighting after a Pygments upgrade, that is the first thing to check.

MkDocs

Pygments finds these lexers through the pygments.lexers entry point group, which means MkDocs needs nothing beyond the install — as long as the package is installed in the same environment as MkDocs itself. With Material for MkDocs:

markdown_extensions:
  - pymdownx.highlight:
      anchor_linenums: true
      line_spans: __span
      pygments_lang_class: true
  - pymdownx.inlinehilite
  - pymdownx.superfences

Then use any alias from the table above as the language of a fenced block. Requirements pinning for a docs build usually looks like:

mkdocs-material
pygments-switch-cli

Read the Docs, Netlify and GitHub Actions builds all work the same way, because they all install from that file.

Sphinx

Sphinx uses Pygments too, so the aliases work in code-block directives once the package is installed:

.. code-block:: nvue

   nv set interface swp1-4 link state up
   nv config apply

Direct use

from pygments import highlight
from pygments.formatters import HtmlFormatter
from pygments.lexers import get_lexer_by_name

html = highlight(config_text, get_lexer_by_name("os10"), HtmlFormatter())

Or from the shell:

pygmentize -l frr -f html -O full frr.conf > frr.html

Token scheme

All seven lexers share one token vocabulary, so a single stylesheet themes every platform consistently and a reader learns one set of colors.

Token	CSS class	Used for
Keyword.Namespace	.kn	commands that enter a context: interface, router bgp, nv set, config
Keyword	.k	other configuration commands: hostname, ip, feature, frr
Keyword.Reserved	.kr	removal and negation: no, default, net del, nv unset
Keyword.Constant	.kc	literal values: up, down, on, off, permit, deny
Name.Function	.nf	interface and port names: Ethernet1/1, swp1s0, PortChannel001
Name.Builtin	.nb	option keywords: description, remote-as, switchport
Name.Variable	.nv	operator-chosen names: the leaf1 in hostname leaf1, the tenant-a in name tenant-a
Name.Attribute	.na	command line flags: -y, --min-links
Number	.m	IPv4/IPv6 addresses, prefixes and route distinguishers
Number.Hex	.mh	MAC addresses
Number.Integer	.mi	VLAN IDs, AS numbers, MTUs, ranges
String	.s	quoted strings and free text after description
Comment.Single

To recolor one of them in Material for MkDocs, add a stylesheet:

/* Make interface names stand out more than the default green. */
.highlight .nf { color: #e36209; font-weight: 700; }

The same keyword can be a context command or an option depending on where it sits, which is the point of the line-oriented design: in vlan 100 the vlan is a context keyword, while in switchport trunk allowed vlan 100 it is an option keyword.

Pasted prompts are recognized in both the network (leaf1(config-if-Et1)#) and Linux (cumulus@leaf01:~$) styles, so a snippet copied straight out of a terminal still reads correctly.

Development

python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e '.[test,docs]'
pytest
ruff check pygments_switch_cli/ tests/
mkdocs serve   # demo site rendering every lexer

examples/ holds one configuration per platform; the test suite lexes all of them and fails on any Token.Error, and the demo site embeds the same files, so an example is both a fixture and documentation.

Adding a platform means a module with a SwitchCLILexer subclass, an entry point in pyproject.toml, an example file and a row in the tables above. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

BSD 3-Clause. See LICENSE.