Requirements

Below are a list of topics that will be helpful if you want to understand how the OpenL2M project works “under the hood”.

Python 3

As of v2.4, all the code is written and tested in Python v3.11. Note that Django 5 require v3.10 or above. There are numerous places to learn this.

The project is by default located in /opt/openl2m. To use these scripts, or work on things, you should first activate the Python virtual environment:

$ cd /opt/openl2m
$ source venv/bin/activate
(venv) $

Normal Django development steps can now be used.

Django

We use the Django web framework, v5.0 or higher. For a good introduction, see the Django Tutorial If you follow this tutorial, you will have enough of an Django understanding to start digging into the code.

E.g. to start the development built-in web server, active the virtual environment, and run:

(venv) $ cd openl2m
(venv) $ python3 manage.py runserver 127.0.0.1:8000

HTML Layout

We use Bootstrap v3.4 for all our HTML layout. A good place to start learning is W3Schools.

SNMP

We primarily use the “easysnmp” library, because is it fast. It requires the Net-SNMP package on your Linux server. See these installation docs

We also use the pysnmplib library for a few backend functions where “easysnmp” does not shine. Specifically, we use pysnmplib to manipulate mib entries that are octetstring values representing bitmaps.

This is extensively used in vlan settings. EasySNMP “struggles” with this, as it uses unicode strings for all internal data representations. Pysnmplib is a pure python implementation that does not have these problems. However, it is significantly slower, so we only use it only where absolutely needed. (Note: pysnmplib is a continuation of the original pysnmp; that library is no longer developed.)

Aruba AOS-CX

We use the pyaoscx library from the github repo, as that frequently provides bugfixes ahead of what is available in the released version available via pip. See requirements.txt for more.

Netmiko

Netmiko is a Python library that establishes SSH connections to network gear. It has a lot of useful functionality. We use it for things like device command line execution, and to provide admin-configurable command line output to users.

Napalm

Napalm is a Network Automation framework. In v2.0, we implemented a Napalm interface, in read-only mode, to show how the new API functions. I.e. this is purely for demonstration purposes, and is not heavily tested or used by the developers.