Containerlab Utilities

netlab clab performs these containerlab-related functions:

• tarball – creates a tar archive that can recreate the lab in a vanilla containerlab environment without netlab.

• build – builds a Docker container for a routing daemon. You can use such containers (together with user-defined configuration files) as images for Linux devices running under containerlab.

Building a Containerlab Distribution

The netlab clab tarball command:

• Collects device configurations from the current lab

• Creates a new copy of containerlab configuration file (clab.config.yml) that contains pointers to startup configurations

• Creates a tar archive containing clab.config.yml and related device configurations.

You can use this command only after starting a containerlab-only lab topology with devices that support the startup-config containerlab parameter.

You can use the tar archive created by netlab clab tarball to recreate the lab in a containerlab environment without installing netlab.

usage: netlab clab tarball [-h] [-v] [-q] [--config [OUTPUT]] [--cleanup] tarball

Create a ready-to-use tarball containing containerlab configuration file and startup
configs

positional arguments:
  tarball            Destination tarball (.tar.gz will be added if needed)

optional arguments:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose      Verbose logging
  -q, --quiet        Run Ansible playbook and tar with minimum output
  --config [OUTPUT]  Startup configuration directory (default: config)
  --cleanup          Clean up config directory and modified configuration file after
                     creating tarball

Building a Docker Container

netlab package includes Dockerfiles for several well-known routing daemons. You can use the netlab clab build image command to build a Docker container running the specified routing daemon.

$ netlab clab build -h
usage: netlab clab build [-h] [-l] [-t TAG] [image]

Build a Docker container image for a routing daemon

positional arguments:
  image              Routing daemon name

options:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit
  -l, --list         List available routing daemons
  -t TAG, --tag TAG  Specify a non-default tag for the container image

For example, use netlab clab build bird to build the netlab/bird:latest container:

To list the available Dockerfiles, use the netlab clab build –list command:

$ netlab clab build --list

The 'netlab build' command can be used to build the following container images

┏━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ daemon ┃ default tag        ┃ description                                    ┃
┡━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ bird   │ netlab/bird:latest │ BIRD Internet Routing Daemon (bird.network.cz) │
└────────┴────────────────────┴────────────────────────────────────────────────┘