ANTS: Awesome Networking Tools Sandbox

ANTS is a sandbox VM (Virtual Machine) preloaded with tools and libraries useful for network programming and automation. It includes ansible, python3, and docker, with customized bash/vim configurations, plus many networking related libraries for your enjoyment.

It primarily leverages the power of vagrant to quickly start (and easily rebuild from scratch) a sandbox for you to develop and experiment without cluttering your host machine.

Quick start - with Vagrant

Install the prerequisites: vagrant and virtualbox.
Right-click -> Save the Vagrantfile somewhere on your machine.
Run vagrant up in the folder where you saved the Vagrantfile
Enjoy your sandbox -> vagrant ssh!

FAQ

Wondering what's installed?

All of the packages, tools and libraries that are pre-installed can be found in ants.yml.

python3: cookiecutter invoke ipython networklab poetry pyenv
other: go vale packer terraform
ansible: ansible-core jmespath
system: git bash zsh vim make tree curl tcpdump sshpass tshark telnet htop openssh-client snmp nmap netcat-openbsd iputils-arping iputils-ping iputils-tracepath net-tools fping nnn build-essential python3-dev
containers: docker-ce docker-compose containerlab

Why Vagrant?

Because it allows you to easily create, use and destroy the same reproducible development environment anywhere.

Can I just get a VM image?

Older releases had an export of the Vagrant VM, but it wasn't really that useful. With the planned migration to packer, I expect to have a properly built ova for each release again.

Building your own ANTS VM

The ANTS vagrant box is built from scratch using the scripts found in the basebox folder. If you clone this repository and run vagrant up in the basebox folder, a fresh Ubuntu box will be downloaded and then the ANTS ansible playbook will be run inside it to install everything else (you still only need virtualbox and vagrant on your machine).

If you don't want to use vagrant at all, you can run the shell commands from the basebox Vagrantfile and the ansible playbook in a VM of your choosing - just keep in mind you're on your own!

Contributing

The main way you can help right now is by using the ANTS boxes to learn and build interesting things. If you run into trouble, point out problems with existing builds (only if you can reproduce them on a clean ants box) by opening a new issue.

To suggest a new library/package/tool, please search all issues first before opening a new one.

Disclaimer

The ANTS virtual machine is provided as is. It is simply a collection of useful libraries and tools built on top of a Linux OS. The ANTS project is released under the MIT License, noting that all of the third-party libraries, software and OS carry their own respective licenses.

This project, its authors and contributors provide no warranties of any kind whatsoever, and you install and use it at your own risk.

For support or help with a particular tool or library please contact the maintainers and the community built around that project, do not open an issue under this project (unless it directly relates to how it was installed within the ANTS machine, its metadata or examples).