Skip to content

env

Directory actions

More options

Directory actions

More options

Latest commit

 

History

History

env

README.md

This directory contains various scripts to help users start trying BESS without much pain. There is a Vagrant script that allows you to bring up a VM that is pre-configured with all required dependencies. There are also Ansible scripts in case you want to build and run BESS on a native Linux environment, either your laptop or server.

Playing with BESS VM

You can launch a fully conigured VM on which you can build and test BESS at your fingertips. We don't provide a binary VM image though. Instead, We provide a Vagrant (https://vagrantup.com) script that automatically generates a VM based on Ubuntu 18.04. You can install Vagrant not only on Linux, but also on Windows or macOS. Once you have vagrant installed, in the current (env/) directory, you can simply run:

$ vagrant up

to launch a VM. The current BESS directory is mapped to /opt/bess in the VM. You can connect to the VM with vagrant ssh. All compilers and libraries are readiliy available.

Building BESS without installing dependencies

If you want to do something more serious than playing within a sandbox VM, but still without getting your hands dirty, you can use our Docker container to build BESS. The container is, similarly to the Vagrant VM, configured with all software packages required by BESS. With Docker available, just run (in the top directory):

$ ./container_build.py

then the script will automatically fetch the container image (nefelinetworks/bess_build at hub.docker.com) and build BESS inside the container. Since the BESS binary is mostly static-linked to external libraries, the binary built in the container should be readily runnable in the host as well.

Ansible scripts

If you plan to build BESS from source and test it without using a VM or a container, you must install required packages on your Linux machine. There are various Ansible script files you can use for those dependencies.

$ ./ansible-playbook -K -i localhost, -c local <YAML script>

Replace <YAML script> with one of the following with different flavors:

  • env/runtime.yml: In case you already have a compiled binary of BESS, this file includes software packages for the runtime. It also configures hugepages.
  • env/build-dep.yml: This file contains minimum software requirements for building BESS.
  • env/dev.yml: This script has all packages included in the both files above, also with some optional yet recommended packages for developers.