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Three pages, in order. Budget about 20 minutes of wall-clock time, most of it waiting for images to pull and SR Linux to boot.

The short version

make lab-jwt          # dev RSA keypair for the CMS (idempotent)
make local-env-init   # pull + start the base stack, mint the CMS API key, seed CMS config
make local-lab-up     # resolve the scenario, build lab images, deploy the devices
make local-lab-discover

If any of those four words mean nothing to you yet, read on — each page below explains one step and the failure modes it protects you from.

In a hurry, or short on RAM

Those commands run the default wan-and-fabric scenario: 15 devices, five of them slow-booting Nokia SR Linux nodes. make scenarios lists the alternatives, and SCENARIO=frr-only gives you a 10-device FRR-only lab that comes up in a fraction of the time:

make local-lab-up SCENARIO=frr-only
make local-lab-discover SCENARIO=frr-only

See Scenarios.

In this section

  •   Prerequisites

    Docker, containerlab (with sudo-less operation — the part people get wrong), openssl and uv. The default @zebbra images are public, so no Quay login is needed. Includes a two-node probe that proves containerlab works before you commit to a full deploy.

  •   Quickstart

    The four commands in order, what each one actually does, what it waits for, and the URLs you get at the end.

  •   Your first discovery

    Trigger the discovery workflow, watch it in the monitor app, and see the devices and their interfaces land in the web client. Then swap the parameter file to exercise autodetection and subnet expansion.

  • Scenarios — running a different network, and adding one of your own.
  • Architecture — the container/network layout you just started.
  • Make targets — the complete target list, including the ones the quickstart does not use.
  • Troubleshooting — read this the moment something hangs; nearly every failure here is a known boot-order race with a distinctive error string.