mn2

A better Mininet CLI

Have you ever wanted Mininet CLI to be just a bit more modern? Or maybe tried to look up what can you even run just to be greeted with entirely unhelpful help output?

Look no further, this project abuses the px command to replace the default cmd-based CLI with a new one using prompt_toolkit and typer for improved user and developer experience.

Current improvements

help for all commands and their options
expanded iperf command (to cover most of iperf2 options)
rich text output
ability to pass arguments to scripts loaded with source
better autocomplete, including option autocomplete and autocompletion from your topology
- also, suggestions from your shell history
better host replacement (e.g. http://h1:8080 will correctly replace h1 with its IP address)

Planned features

some basic control flow (loops, conditionals, etc.) for in-shell scripting
file autocomplete for relevant options
live input validation
better output options (e.g. allowing for CSV output from iperf)
pipelining commands maybe?

Installation and usage

Download mn2 from the latest release to your work folder in the Mininet VM (or just wherever you're planning on using mininet)
Open the mininet CLI
Run source mn2
Your prompt should change to mn2> and you should now be using the new shell :) Rerunning source mn2 should no longer do anything (because it checks if it's already being used)
you can go back to mininet using quit and exit commands or just by sending EOF with Ctrl+D

Screenshots

FAQ

Q: Why even make this?

A: I was annoyed at the mininet CLI when doing a lab excercise. That's enough for me.

Q: Why not just contribute to Mininet?

A: The Python portion of Mininet currently doesn't have any external dependencies - it's standard library all the way down. While it's probably great for CI and means users won't have weird dependency issues, it means that adding many of the features here would require either changing that status quo or significant work to reimplement them.

Both would be difficult and take a lot of time.

Besides - at the time of writing last Mininet release was 2 years old. I wanted to have something usable for my lab excercises, not lab excercises someone else will have in a few years.

Q: What the hell is this script doing?

A: the mn2 script simply runs a base85 encoded (to fit in a single line) script generrated from the mn2 module with stickytape - a slightly cursed bundler that embeds all external dependencies within the script itself, unpacking them on startup. I'm using a significantly modified version here which you can find under oplik0/stickytape - primary difference from upstream is usage of an encoded zip file instead of just embeding sources as strings.

Additionally, for the production build, everything is minified to save on space - making for even more arkane-looking python inside :)

oplik0/mn2

mn2