Advanced External Tools Scenarios

The basic functionality of external tools has been implemented, but it’s very rudimentary. Future enhancements include:

  • Support for local execution environment and Python virtual environments (potentially with env) variables

  • Support for containerlab and multi-provider deployments

  • Multiple instances of the same tool (multilab deployments)

Additional configuration file (config list) functionality might include:

  • copy – copy source file to configuration file (or we could decide that everything is a template)

  • output – call tool-specific output module, passing the contents of the output parameter to that module

Additional runtime functionality might include:

  • message: A message to display after the tool has been started. Can be used to print out short usage instructions.

  • venv: Python virtual environment to use in local runtime.

  • env: Environment variables to use when executing runtime commands.