Getting started

To start your network, you need to do two things:

1. Creating a topology
2. Running the network

Topology creation

To create a new topology, we need to declare a class that extends IPTopo.

from ipmininet.iptopo import IPTopo

class MyTopology(IPTopo):
    pass

Then we extend in its build method to add switches, hosts, routers and links between the nodes.

from ipmininet.iptopo import IPTopo

class MyTopology(IPTopo):

    def build(self, *args, **kwargs):

        r1 = self.addRouter("r1")
        r2 = self.addRouter("r2")

        s1 = self.addSwitch("s1")
        s2 = self.addSwitch("s2")

        h1 = self.addHost("h1")
        h2 = self.addHost("h2")

        self.addLink(r1, r2)
        self.addLink(s1, r1)
        self.addLink(h1, s1)
        self.addLink(s2, r2)
        self.addLink(h2, s2)

        super(MyTopology, self).build(*args, **kwargs)

We can add daemons to the routers as well.

from ipmininet.iptopo import IPTopo
from ipmininet.router.config import SSHd

class MyTopology(IPTopo):

    def build(self, *args, **kwargs):

        r1 = self.addRouter("r1")
        r1.addDaemon(SSHd)

        # [...]

        super(MyTopology, self).build(*args, **kwargs)

By default, OSPF and OSPF6 are launched on each router. This means that your network has basic routing working by default. To change that, we have to modify the router configuration class.

from ipmininet.iptopo import IPTopo
from ipmininet.router.config import SSHd, RouterConfig

class MyTopology(IPTopo):

    def build(self, *args, **kwargs):

        r1 = self.addRouter("r1", config=RouterConfig)
        r1.addDaemon(SSHd)

        # [...]

        super(MyTopology, self).build(*args, **kwargs)

We can customize the daemons configuration by passing options to them. In the following code snippet, we change the hello interval of the OSPF daemon. You can find the configuration options in Configuring daemons

from ipmininet.iptopo import IPTopo
from ipmininet.router.config import OSPF, RouterConfig

class MyTopology(IPTopo):

    def build(self, *args, **kwargs):

        r1 = self.addRouter("r1", config=RouterConfig)
        r1.addDaemon(OSPF, hello_int=1)

        # [...]

        super(MyTopology, self).build(*args, **kwargs)

Network run

We run the topology by using the following code. The IPCLI object creates a extended Mininet CLI. More details can be found in Command-Line interface As for Mininet, IPMininet networks need root access to be executed.

from ipmininet.ipnet import IPNet
from ipmininet.cli import IPCLI

net = IPNet(topo=MyTopology())
try:
    net.start()
    IPCLI(net)
finally:
    net.stop()

Examples

A few documented examples are in examples in the IPMininet repository. More of them can be found in this repository.

Mininet compatibility

IPMininet is an upper layer above Mininet. Therefore, everything that works in Mininet, also works in IPMininet. Feel free to consult the Mininet documentation as well.