Welcome to Frenetic

The languages used to program networks today lack modern features. Programming them is a complicated and error-prone task, and outages and infiltrations are frequent. Frenetic is an open-source Software Defined Network (SDN) controller platform designed to make SDN programming easy, modular, and semantically correct, based on programming languages with the following essential features:

High-level abstractions that give programmers direct control over the network, allowing them to specify what they want the network to do without worrying about how to implement it.
Modular constructs that facilitate compositional reasoning about programs.
Portability, allowing programs written for one platform to be reused with different devices.
Rigorous semantic foundations that precisely document the meaning of the language and provide a solid platform for mechanical program analysis tools.

You can build Frenetic-based network applications with:

OCaml
Python
REST and JSON (i.e., any programming language!)

Getting Started

Installation

Install OPAM, version 2.0 or higher.
Switch to OCaml version 4.11.0 or greater:
```
opam switch 4.11.0    
```
Install dune:
```
opam install dune
```
Install required OCaml dependencies. Note that dune can compute the list of dependencies,
```
dune external-lib-deps --missing @all
```
and you can install each using OPAM---for example:
```
opam install ocamlgraph    
```
Build Frenetic
```
make && make install
```
(Optional) install Mininet

Hello World in SDN

The following instructions assume a Linux host with Mininet installed.

Start up a terminal window.
Start up a Mininet sample network with a switch and 2 hosts:
```
$ sudo mn --topo=single,2 --controller=remote
```
Try pinging the host h2 from the host h1:
```
mininet> h1 ping h2
```
Unfortunately, the ping won't work because you don't have an SDN network program in place! Press CTRL-C to stop the pinging.
Start up another terminal window and start up Frenetic:
```
$ frenetic http-controller --verbosity debug
```
In a third terminal window, start up the example program for the Python repeater:
```
$ python -m frenetic.examples.repeater
```
Now, back in the window running Mininet, the ping should now succeed:
```
mininet> h1 ping h2
```
Congratulations! You now have a working Software Defined Network.

Where to Go From Here

Learn Frenetic programming in Python from the Frenetic Programmers Guide
Scan the Quick Start guides in the Wiki
Try some Python examples, see Example Applications in Python
Learn Frenetic programming in OCaml from the Frenetic Tutorial
Learn the theory behind Frenetic by reading the papers at http://frenetic-lang.org
See examples of production Frenetic-based SDN's at https://github.com/coscin/coscin-app and https://github.com/coscin/gates.
Consult the Frenetic API documentation.

Contributing

Frenetic is an open source project, and we encourage you to contribute!

File Issues and Feature Requests in Github Issues
Join the Frenetic Mailing List for more in-depth guidance

Credits

See Frenetic Members and Support

License

Frenetic is released under the GNU Lesser Public License, version 3. Details

frenetic-lang/frenetic