AGENTS.md

Agents

Containerlab is a CLI tool for building and managing labs with containerized network devices. It provides a simple and efficient way to create both small and large network topologies using Docker containers.

Repository structure

The repository is organized as follows:

• .github/workflows: Contains GitHub Actions workflows for CI/CD.
• bin: Directory where the built containerlab binary is placed.
• cmd: Contains the main command-line interface code for containerlab written with Cobra framework.
• core: Contains the core logic of containerlab, including lab management, topology parsing, and other functionalities.
• docs: Contains the documentation for containerlab, written with mkdocs-material framework.
• nodes: Contains the definitions and implementations of different types of network nodes that can be used in labs.
• links: Contains the logic for managing links between nodes in the lab.
• tests: Contains unit and integration tests for containerlab.
• runtime: Contains the runtime (docker and podman) logic for managing the lifecycle of labs and nodes.

Documentation

Documentation is written with mkdocs-material framework and is present in the docs directory. To serve the documentation locally, use:

make serve-docs

To cleanup all started labs, use:

clab des -a -c -y

Formatting

To format the code, use:

make format

Building

The build and test automation is done in Makefile.

To build the clab binary, use:

make build

When building, the containerlab binary (alias clab) is placed in the bin directory.

Testing

The unit tests are implemented with Go's built-in testing framework. To run the tests, use the following command:

make test

The integration tests are implemented with Robot Framework. To run the tests, use the following command:

CLAB_BIN=$(pwd)/bin/containerlab ./tests/rf-run.sh docker tests/<path to robot file>

When integration tests are run, the lab is destroyed automatically after the test ends.

To run lab deployment with debug logs, use -d flag.