quickstart.rst

Quick Start

If you want to try Polycube, this is a 5 minutes document that will guide you through the basics.

In order to try polycube you need to use two components:

• polycubed: the Polycube daemon <polycubed/polycubed>, that must be up and running.
• polycubectl: the Polycube CLI <polycubectl/polycubectl>, used to interact with the framework.

There are two modes to try polycube: Using Docker or installing it on the bare metal.

Docker

Docker is the easiest and fastest way to try polycube if you are a new user because it only requires to have a recent kernel version. See updating-linux-kernel.

Pull Polycube Docker image

docker pull polycubenetwork/polycube:latest

Run the Polycube Docker and launch polycubed (the polycube daemon) inside it. The Docker container is launched in the host networking stack (--network host), privileged mode (--privileged) is necessary to use eBPF features.

docker run  -it --rm --privileged --network host \
-v /lib/modules:/lib/modules:ro -v /usr/src:/usr/src:ro -v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro \
polycubenetwork/polycube:latest /bin/bash -c 'polycubed -d && /bin/bash'

polycubectl is available inside the container. Refer to polycubectl CLI <polycubectl/polycubectl>.

polycubectl --help

To stop the daemon just remove the container. For example closing its terminal with the exit command.

Bare Metal

This is a more elaborated way only recommended for advance users. Please the installation guide <installation> to get detailed information about how to compile and install polycube and its dependencies.

Once you have polcyube installed in your system, you can start the polycubed service:

# start polycubed service
# (sudo service start polycubed will work in many distros as well)
sudo systemctl start polycubed

# check service status
sudo systemctl status polycubed

Start interacting with the framework by using polycubectl. Refer to polycubectl CLI <polycubectl/polycubectl>.

polycubectl --help

To stop the polycubed service use:

sudo systemctl stop polycubed