Installing Arista EOS Container

To use Arista EOS with containerlab you need to register for a free account on Arista’s website. You then have two options to download the EOS container.

Option 1: Download the Container from Arista’s Website

  • Download cEOS from Arista Software Download page (registration/login required)

  • The downloaded file is a xzipped tar file. If it’s saved as .tar file (that’s what Chrome on MacOS does), rename it to .tar.xz file

  • Unzip the file with unxz filename

cEOS tar archive does not contain the container image name (repository and tag); you have to set them when importing the archive into Docker image repository. To display the default cEOS container image name used by netlab, run netlab show images -d eos. You can use a different tag for your cEOS image (very useful if you want to test different cEOS versions), but then you’ll have to specify it in your topology file.

  • Install the Docker image with docker image import <tar-filename> <tag>, for example docker image import cEOS64-lab-4.31.2F.tar ceos:4.31.2F.

If you used a container tag that differs from netlab defaults, specify it in the topology file (more details). For example, to use cEOS 4.31.2F when netlab expects a different container name, add the following line to the lab topology file:

defaults.devices.eos.clab.image: "ceos:4.31.2F"

Alternatively, if you want to use the same cEOS image in all your labs, add the following line to ~/.netlab.yml user defaults file (replacing ceos:4.31.2F with your image tag).

devices.eos.clab.image: "ceos:4.31.2F"

Option 2: Download the container using eos-downloader

See the eos-downloader documentation for details.

  • Go to the user portal page and create a portal token to generate and record your token[1]

  • Install eos-downloader:

pip install eos-downloader