Docker

Installing docker

We recommend installing Docker Community Edition (CE) according to the official docker engine installation guide.

Initial configuration

sudo mkdir -p /etc/faucet
sudo vi /etc/faucet/faucet.yaml
sudo vi /etc/faucet/gauge.yaml

See Installation and Configuration for configuration options.

In particular, see vendor specific docs for additional files that may be necessary in /etc/faucet to configure the switch pipeline.

Official builds

We provide official automated builds on Docker Hub so that you can run Faucet easily without having to build your own.

We use Docker tags to differentiate between versions of Faucet. The latest tag will always point to the latest stable release of Faucet. All tagged versions of Faucet in git are also available to use, for example using the faucet/faucet:1.7.0 Docker will run the released version 1.7.0 of Faucet.

By default the Faucet and Gauge images are run as the faucet user under UID 0, GID 0. If you need to change that it can be overridden at runtime with the Docker flags: -e LOCAL_USER_ID and -e LOCAL_GROUP_ID.

To pull and run the latest version of Faucet:

mkdir -p /var/log/faucet/
docker pull faucet/faucet:latest
docker run -d \
    --name faucet \
    --restart=always \
    -v /etc/faucet/:/etc/faucet/ \
    -v /var/log/faucet/:/var/log/faucet/ \
    -p 6653:6653 \
    -p 9302:9302 \
    faucet/faucet

Port 6653 is used for OpenFlow, port 9302 is used for Prometheus - port 9302 may be omitted if you do not need Prometheus.

To pull and run the latest version of Gauge:

mkdir -p /var/log/faucet/gauge/
docker pull faucet/gauge:latest
docker run -d \
    --name gauge \
    --restart=always \
    -v /etc/faucet/:/etc/faucet/ \
    -v /var/log/faucet/:/var/log/faucet/ \
    -p 6654:6653 \
    -p 9303:9303 \
    faucet/gauge

Port 6654 is used for OpenFlow, port 9303 is used for Prometheus - port 9303 may be omitted if you do not need Prometheus.

Additional Arguments

You may wish to run faucet under docker with additional arguments, for example: setting certificates for an encrypted control channel. This can be done by overriding the docker entrypoint like so:

docker run -d \
    --name faucet \
    --restart=always \
    -v /etc/faucet/:/etc/faucet/ \
    -v /etc/ryu/ssl/:/etc/ryu/ssl/ \
    -v /var/log/faucet/:/var/log/faucet/ \
    -p 6653:6653 \
    -p 9302:9302 \
    faucet/faucet \
    faucet \
    --ctl-privkey /etc/ryu/ssl/ctrlr.key \
    --ctl-cert /etc/ryu/ssl/ctrlr.cert  \
    --ca-certs /etc/ryu/ssl/sw.cert

You can get a list of all additional arguments faucet supports by running:

docker run -it faucet/faucet faucet --help

Dockerfile

If building Faucet yourself, you first need to build the base images from this repo:

cd docker/base
docker build -t faucet/faucet-base .
cd ../python
docker build -t faucet/faucet-python3 .
cd ../..
docker build -t faucet/faucet .

It can be run as following:

mkdir -p /var/log/faucet/
docker run -d \
    --name faucet \
    --restart=always \
    -v /etc/faucet/:/etc/faucet/ \
    -v /var/log/faucet/:/var/log/faucet/ \
    -p 6653:6653 \
    faucet/faucet

By default the Dockerfile for Faucet will build an image that will run as the faucet user, if you need to change that it can be overridden at runtime with the Docker -e LOCAL_USER_ID flag.

By default it listens on port 6653 for an OpenFlow switch to connect. Faucet expects to find the configuration file faucet.yaml in the config folder. If needed the -e option can be used to specify the names of files with the FAUCET_LOG, FAUCET_EXCEPTION_LOG, FAUCET_CONFIG environment variables.

Dockerfile.gauge

If building Gauge yourself, you first need to build the base images from this repo:

cd docker/base
docker build -t faucet/faucet-base .
cd ../python
docker build -t faucet/faucet-python3 .
cd ../..
docker build -f Dockerfile.gauge -t faucet/gauge .

It can be run as following:

mkdir -p /var/log/faucet
docker run -d \
    --name gauge \
    --restart=always \
    -v /etc/faucet/:/etc/faucet/ \
    -v /var/log/faucet/:/var/log/faucet/ \
    -p 6654:6653 \
    faucet/gauge

By default the Dockerfile for Gauge will build an image that will run as the faucet user, if you need to change that it can be overridden at runtime with the Docker -e LOCAL_USER_ID flag.

By default listens on port 6653. If you are running this with Faucet you will need to modify the port one of the containers listens on and configure your switches to talk to both. The faucet configuration file faucet.yaml should be placed in the config directory, this also should include to configuration for gauge.

Docker compose

This is an example docker-compose file that can be used to set up gauge to talk to Prometheus and InfluxDB with a Grafana instance for dashboards and visualisations.

It can be run with:

docker-compose pull
docker-compose up

The time-series databases with the default settings will write to /opt/prometheus/ /opt/influxdb/shared/data/db you can edit these locations by modifying the docker-compose.yaml file.

On OSX, some of the default shared paths are not accessible, so to overwrite the location that volumes are written to on your host, export an environment varible name FAUCET_PREFIX and it will get prepended to the host paths. For example:

export FAUCET_PREFIX=/opt/faucet

When all the docker containers are running we will need to configure Grafana to talk to Prometheus and InfluxDB. First login to the Grafana web interface on port 3000 (e.g http://localhost:3000) using the default credentials of admin:admin.

Then add two data sources. Use the following settings for prometheus:

Name: Prometheus
Type: Prometheus
Url: http://prometheus:9090
Access: proxy

And the following settings for InfluxDB:

Name: InfluxDB
Type: InfluxDB
Url: http://influxdb:8086
Access: proxy
With Credentials: true
Database: faucet
User: faucet
Password: faucet

Check the connection using test connection.

From here you can add a new dashboard and a graphs for pulling data from the data sources. See the Grafana’s documentation for more on how to do this.