Autocon2 CI/CD Workshop Development Repository

Hello! Welcome to Autocon2 CI/CD workshop developed originally by Eric Chou and Jeff Kala, and revisited by Christian Adell.

You can find the different lab instructions in each of the folders in this repository.

• Lab 1. Basic Git Operations
• Lab 2. First Pipeline
• Lab 3. Collaboration Tools
• Lab 4. Source Code Checks
• Lab 5. Generate Configs
• Lab 6. Testing Frameworks

But first things first, we would like to walk you through how to set up the development environment for the workshop.

Lab Components

Here is an overview of lab:

Here are the details regarding each components:

• GitLab: We will use the SaaS version of GitLab as the CI server. The CI server handles the committing, building, testing, staging, and releasing the changes.
• GitLab Runners: GitLab runners are workers that registers itself with the GitLab server and managed by the GitLab server. They are responsible to carry out the instructions by the GitLab server.
• GitHub Codespace: We will use GitHub codepsace as our IDE as well as the virtual server to run our network lab. GitHub provides these container-based development environment for developers. We will use Containerlab to run a few network devices for our lab. GitHub offer a generous free tier in Codespace that should remain to be free for the duration of this lab.
• Containerlab: We will use containerlab for our lab devices running inside of codepsace.
• Arista cEOS: We will use Arista cEOS for our lab for their light overhead and relative high adaption in production networks.

Notes:

• You will use the free tier of GitLab and GitHub for this lab.
• We are using GitLab instead of GitHub for the CI/CD server because its free tier provides custom runners, which is a paid feature in GitHub.

GitLab Account Registration and cEOS Download

Please do the following steps to set up the lab:

1. Register for a free GitLab.com account here if you do not have one. Verify your email address after registration, and also make sure to validate your identity via phone registration.
2. For a new registration, a group and a project name are required. You can use Autocon as the group name and a tem project name or 'Autocon_Lab1' as that is one of the project we will create later:

Note

If you registered a new account, you must do the email verification of the new account or you may see issues later.

2. Download the free Arista cEOS image here. The image is free but you do need to register an Arista account with your business email. We will import the Arista image Codespace later.

Please download images later than 4.28. We will use 4.32.0F for our lab.

Note

Download the 64 bit image.

Tip

You just need to download the image for now, for reference here is the import instruction from containerlab and a nice walk through video from Roman.

Lab Setup

Alright, now it is time to tie everything together.

1. In this repository, we can start Codespace by going to Code button on the top left corner and choose 'Create codespace on main':

Tip

It will take a bit of time to build codespace for the first time, you can click on building codespace to check on the progress. After it started for the first time, when you stop/start the instance it will be much faster.

Once Codespace is started (i.e., you see the prompt @<your id> ➜ /workspaces/autocon2-cicd-workshop (main) $), in the Terminal, you can verify that Poetry, Docker and containerlab are installed and running:

@ericchou1 ➜ /workspaces/autocon2-cicd-workshop-dev (main) $ poetry --version
Poetry (version 2.1.1)

@ericchou1 ➜ /workspaces/autocon2-cicd-workshop-dev (main) $ docker run hello-world
Unable to find image 'hello-world:latest' locally
latest: Pulling from library/hello-world
...<skip>
Hello from Docker!
This message shows that your installation appears to be working correctly.
<skip>

@ericchou1 ➜ /workspaces/autocon2-cicd-workshop-dev (main) $ containerlab version
  ____ ___  _   _ _____  _    ___ _   _ _____ ____  _       _
 / ___/ _ \| \ | |_   _|/ \  |_ _| \ | | ____|  _ \| | __ _| |__
| |  | | | |  \| | | | / _ \  | ||  \| |  _| | |_) | |/ _` | '_ \
| |__| |_| | |\  | | |/ ___ \ | || |\  | |___|  _ <| | (_| | |_) |
 \____\___/|_| \_| |_/_/   \_\___|_| \_|_____|_| \_\_|\__,_|_.__/

    version: 0.66.0
     commit: e777ef17
       date: 2025-03-07T10:23:56Z
     source: https://github.com/srl-labs/containerlab
 rel. notes: https://containerlab.dev/rn/0.66/

2. After codespace is started, right click in the Explorer section and choose upload:

3. Use command docker import cEOS64.<version>.tar.xz ceos:<version> to import the image, for example:

docker import cEOS64-lab-4.32.0F.tar ceos:4.32.0F

4. Start the custom GitLab Runner in a docker container.

docker run -d --name gitlab-runner --restart always \
-v /srv/gitlab-runner/config:/etc/gitlab-runner \
-v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
gitlab/gitlab-runner:latest

Make sure that the runner is running with docker ps:

$ docker ps
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                         COMMAND                  CREATED         STATUS         PORTS     NAMES
a9d873449385   gitlab/gitlab-runner:latest   "/usr/bin/dumb-init …"   5 seconds ago   Up 4 seconds             gitlab-runner

5. Register GitLab Runner (screenshot following the steps):
   • Under the GitLab project you created, get runner token via Project -> Settings -> CI/CD -> Runners -> Button "New project runner".
   • When creating this runner, we will use tags recommend something like first-last-01 to specify the jobs this runner can pickup.
   • Click on the "Create runner" button.
   • Copy the runner authentication token.
   • Come back to the Codespace instance.
   • Register runner via the following command docker run --rm -it -v /srv/gitlab-runner/config:/etc/gitlab-runner gitlab/gitlab-runner register
   • Answer the questions:
     • Enter GitLab instance: https://gitlab.com/
     • Enter the registration token: <token you copied previously>
     • Enter name for the runner: leave the default
     • Enter an executor: docker
     • Enter the default Docker image: python:3.10

$ docker run --rm -it -v /srv/gitlab-runner/config:/etc/gitlab-runner gitlab/gitlab-runner register
Runtime platform arch=amd64 os=linux pid=7 revision=c6eae8d7 version=17.5.2

Running in system-mode.

Enter the GitLab instance URL (for example, https://gitlab.com/):
https://gitlab.com/

Enter the registration token:
glrt-t3_ABC123

Verifying runner... is valid runner=t3_GdM4Gs

Enter a name for the runner. This is stored only in the local config.toml file:
[460ba0646748]:

Enter an executor: custom, virtualbox, docker, instance, shell, ssh, parallels, docker-windows, docker+machine, kubernetes, docker-autoscaler:
docker

Enter the default Docker image (for example, ruby:2.7):
python:3.10

Runner registered successfully. Feel free to start it, but if it's running already the config should be automatically reloaded!
Configuration (with the authentication token) was saved in "/etc/gitlab-runner/config.toml"

Lab Setup Walkthrough Video

Here are video walkthrough to help with illustrate the lab setup.

Video 1. Overview and Software Download

Video 2. Codespace Launch and Preparation

Video 3. Create Gitlab Project

Video 4. Runner Registration

That is it, having gone thru the steps will ensure we can jump right into the workshop lab at Autocon2.

Below is an optional step for those who are somewhat familiar with Gitlab and want to check the end-to-end setup.

(Optional) Checking for end-to-end Lab Setup

This is complete optional and we will go over it in the workshop as our first lab, but if you are up for some testing, we can test the end-to-end lab setup with the following steps.

• Start containerlab (and use --node-filter to only create 2 nodes for now.)

@jeffkala ➜ /workspaces/autocon2-cicd-workshop (main) $ cd clab/


@jeffkala ➜ /workspaces/autocon2-cicd-workshop/clab (main) $ sudo containerlab deploy --topo ceos-lab.clab.yml --node-filter ceos-01,ceos-02
INFO[0000] Containerlab v0.59.0 started
INFO[0000] Applying node filter: ["ceos-01" "ceos-02"]
INFO[0000] Parsing & checking topology file: ceos-lab.clab.yml
WARN[0000] Unable to init module loader: stat /lib/modules/6.5.0-1025-azure/modules.dep: no such file or directory. Skipping...
INFO[0000] Creating lab directory: /workspaces/autocon2-cicd-workshop/clab/clab-ceos-lab
INFO[0000] Creating container: "ceos-02"
INFO[0000] Creating container: "ceos-01"
INFO[0000] Running postdeploy actions for Arista cEOS 'ceos-01' node
INFO[0000] Created link: ceos-01:eth1 <--> ceos-02:eth1
INFO[0000] Running postdeploy actions for Arista cEOS 'ceos-02' node
INFO[0046] Adding containerlab host entries to /etc/hosts file
INFO[0046] Adding ssh config for containerlab nodes
+---+---------+--------------+--------------+------+---------+---------------+--------------+
| # |  Name   | Container ID |    Image     | Kind |  State  | IPv4 Address  | IPv6 Address |
+---+---------+--------------+--------------+------+---------+---------------+--------------+
| 1 | ceos-01 | a425c6fb993a | ceos:4.32.0F | ceos | running | 172.17.0.3/16 | N/A          |
| 2 | ceos-02 | 44ad61fe178c | ceos:4.32.0F | ceos | running | 172.17.0.4/16 | N/A          |
+---+---------+--------------+--------------+------+---------+---------------+--------------+

• Create a test project(back in GitLab), and then add a file hosts.yaml with the following content (you can do this directly in GitLab UI, next to the Project name, click on the "+" sign and choose "New file"):

[!info] Best to create a brand new project as Autocon_Lab1 you created originally is going to be built upon in the following labs.

---
eos-1:
  hostname: "172.17.0.3" # Update if your deploy chose different IPs
  port: 22
  username: "admin"
  password: "admin"
  platform: "arista_eos"

eos-2:
  hostname: "172.17.0.4" # Update if your deploy chose different IPs
  port: 22
  username: "admin"
  password: "admin"
  platform: "arista_eos"

• Create the following show_version.py file

#!/usr/bin/env python
from nornir import InitNornir
from nornir_netmiko import netmiko_send_command
from nornir_utils.plugins.functions import print_result

# Initialize Nornir, by default it will look for the
# hosts.yaml file in the same directory.
nr = InitNornir()

# Run the show version command for each of the devices.
# store the value in the results variable.
result = nr.run(
    task=netmiko_send_command,
    command_string="show version"
)

# print the results in
print_result(result)

• Create the following CI file .gitlab-ci.yml

---
stages:
  - deploy

deploy testing:
  image: "python:3.10"
  stage: deploy
  tags:
    - "ericchou-1" # Update this with the tag you add to your runner.
  script:
    - pip3 install nornir_utils nornir_netmiko
    - python3 show_version.py

• After you commit the .gitlab-ci.yml, GitLab is instructed to run a pipeline. After a few minutes (~15 minutes), you should see the following result by navigating to Build --> Pipelines:

Final Lab Walk-Through

We encourage you to perform the labs first, if you run into any issues and prefer to see a walk-through for the labs, we prepared the following videos:

• Lab 0. Preparation
• Lab 1. Basic Git Operations
• Lab 2. First Pipeline
• Lab 3. Collaboration Tools
• Lab 4. Source Code Checks
• Lab 5. Generate Configs
• Lab 6. Testing Frameworks