Share Lab Access#
Lightweight, fast to deploy, and reproducible containerlabs are meant to be shared via Git. But sometimes, you can't quite share the entire lab... Maybe the recipient doesn't have access to the container images or has other limitations that prevent them from running a copy of you lab.
Yet, you might find yourself in need to share access of your lab with one or many users. Quite often you want someone else to have a look at your lab when you found something or got stuck. Or maybe you are a lecturer and want to broadcast your lab interaction to your students.
Here we will discuss different ways how you can share your lab with others in a secure and interactive way.
SSHX tools#
SSHX is a web-based terminal emulator that allows you to share access to a terminal sessions with others and have a collaborative terminal experience.
Containerlab users can leverage this handy free service1 to share lab access with read/write and read-only access by leveraging the tools sshx command set.
Sharing the lab#
You can share any given lab that you have running by providing its name or a path to its topology file. For instance, consider the following labs running on a system:
❯ clab ins -a
╭─────────────────────────────────────┬──────────┬──────┬──────────────────────────────┬─────────┬───────────────────╮
│ Topology │ Lab Name │ Name │ Kind/Image │ State │ IPv4/6 Address │
├─────────────────────────────────────┼──────────┼──────┼──────────────────────────────┼─────────┼───────────────────┤
│ /tmp/.clab/topo-2502707021.clab.yml │ srl │ srl │ nokia_srlinux │ running │ 172.20.20.2 │
│ │ │ │ ghcr.io/nokia/srlinux:latest │ │ 3fff:172:20:20::2 │
╰─────────────────────────────────────┴──────────┴──────┴──────────────────────────────┴─────────┴───────────────────╯
To share access to this lab with others, you can use the tools sshx attach command and provide the lab name as an input. The lab name is simply srl, so here we go:
Note, the log message that goes as SSHX successfully started as it will also have the SSHX link in it. By pasting this link in a browser you will get a collaborative terminal session in the browser where you can open many shell windows that will belong to the sshx container that runs from the ghcr.io/srl-labs/network-multitool with lots of networking tools installed.
The great part is that this sshx container has access to all other lab nodes and you can refer to them by name, as they appear in your topology file. For example, we can ssh to the SR Linux container that is part of our lab:
Read-only link#
SSHX can generate a link that will provide read-only access to the shared web terminal. The read-only link will let someone to see the terminal and what happens there, but they won't be able to create terminal windows or type in commands to the opened ones.
To generate a link with a read-only component, run:
The link will have two components, separate by a comma, for example:
16:59:31 INFO SSHX successfully reattached link=https://sshx.io/s/MkaIiGYLq7#TfqVxBhGys4r6F,hOkWFAcC8wFqNY
The part before the comma will be the read-only link - https://sshx.io/s/MkaIiGYLq7#TfqVxBhGys4r6F and the full link gives read/write access.
Detaching#
When you want to disconnect the shared web terminal:
This will remove the sshx container.
Listing shared links#
If you want to list the shared labs you may have running:
Embedding SSHX in your lab#
In case you want your lab to start with an SSHX container as part of it, you can add a node to your lab like this:
name: shared-lab
topology:
nodes:
srl:
kind: nokia_srlinux
image: ghcr.io/nokia/srlinux:25.3.1
sshx:
kind: linux
image: ghcr.io/srl-labs/network-multitool
exec:
- >-
ash -c "curl -sSf https://sshx.io/get | sh > /dev/null ;
sshx -q --enable-readers > /tmp/sshx &
while [ ! -s /tmp/sshx ]; do sleep 1; done && cat /tmp/sshx"
By adding the sshx node to you will get the sshx link in the lab output right in the deployment log:
# the rest of the deploy log is omitted for brevity
21:44:15 INFO Running postdeploy actions kind=nokia_srlinux node=srl
21:44:28 INFO Executed command node=sshx command="ash -c curl -sSf https://sshx.io/get | sh > /dev/null" stdout=""
21:44:28 INFO Executed command node=sshx command="ash -c sshx -q --enable-readers > /tmp/sshx &" stdout=""
21:44:28 INFO Executed command node=sshx command="cat /tmp/sshx"
stdout=
│ https://sshx.io/s/94eAaunO2L#CbTbaD6bqB90oU,mCIP5PtBmF41qL
21:44:28 INFO Adding host entries path=/etc/hosts
21:44:28 INFO Adding SSH config for nodes path=/etc/ssh/ssh_config.d/clab-shared-lab.conf