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:1.8.0 Docker will run the released version 1.8.0 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

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

And the following settings for InfluxDB:

Name: InfluxDB
Type: InfluxDB
Url: http://influxdb:8086
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. Hover over the + button on the left sidebar in the web interface and click Import.

We will import the following dashboards, just download the following links and upload them through the grafana dashboard import screen: